Publications

The Melibur oil and gas field was discovered in 1984 in the Malacca Strait PSC in Central Sumatra, Indonesia. The field contains oil and gas in the Upper and Lower Sihapas Formations. After 25 years in production, the vast majority of oil and gas production has come from the Upper Sihapas D and E sands, with minor localized oil from Lower Sihapas sands. With production in decline, much effort has gone into finding ‘missed’ oil zones, which were not interesting enough in the past to test and develop. The team looked both within existing wells and also on a wider scale by re-correlating sands between wells. The Upper Sihapas D1 sands are shallow (around 800ft) and had indications of oil from both open-hole and cased-hole logs, although they were not guaranteed to flow oil because they were thin sand lenses with low resistivity. The three best candidates were worked over from 2011 to 2014. Operationally, the workoverwent smoothly, but oil rates and recoveries varied widely between wells. Two of the workovers were commercial successes.