SPE-191657-MS

Accessing New Pay Intervals in the Tubing-Casing Annulus Above Top

Packer with Cement Packer Technology, S Field, Peninsular Malaysia

M. Alham M. Johan, Sirag Al Zayani, Arthur Lee Moritz, Jr., and Charles Taylor, EnQuest Malaysia; Rahmat
Wibisono and Shahril R. M. Mokhtar, PETRONAS; Kelvin Thian and Marina Samvelova, Halliburton

Copyright 2018, Society of Petroleum Engineers

This paper was prepared for presentation at the 2018 SPE Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition held in Dallas, Texas, 24-26 September 2018.

This paper was selected for presentation by an SPE program committee following review of information contained in an abstract submitted by the author(s). Contents
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Abstract
As a low-cost alternative to expensive rig workovers, placement of a cement packer between tubing and
casing has been previously applied in Malaysia. The purpose is to create a new annular barrier above the
existing production packer to gain access to behind-casing opportunities (BCOs) or pay zones, removing
the need for a workover. These pay zones, usually with minor or unknown production potential, have been
left by the operator during initial completion because there were larger pay zones in deeper reservoirs.
Cement packer placement can be achieved using basic intervention equipment as opposed to more expensive
workover units.
The cement packer technique eliminates the need of recompleting the well with a conventional workover
rig and reduces operational complications together with cost. There are different methods to deploy a cement
packer. The highest chance of success, particularly when larger volumes of cement are needed, is using
coiled tubing (CT) as the primary method to place the cement slurry in the tubing/casing annulus. In this
method, a cement retainer was used and conveyed with CT. CT provides the ability to sting into the retainer
and cement being displaced through the coil, ensuring all completion accessories have no contact with
cement slurry which can impair their functionality, and also prevents U-tube effect of the slurry once cement
is placed behind the tubing. After the cement is set, a cement bond log (CBL) is run to confirm cement
integrity behind the completion tubing before adding new perforations.
This paper presents the successful cement packer placement operation with the help of the CT executed on
an offshore platform in Peninsular Malaysia. A potential pay zone of the I-Group reservoir was discovered
in the field after running pulsed-neutron cased-hole saturation logging tools, which are situated above the
production packer; appraisal was required because of the unknown fluid type. Close collaboration among
various parties in candidate selection, job preparation and design, cement laboratory testing, and operational
planning and execution, were keys to the success of this pilot operation. By proving operational feasibility
and economics, the technique opened up additional opportunities in restoring idle wells with bypassed
reserves within the same field.
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Introduction
The S Field was discovered in the early 1970s. After initial discovery, 10 appraisal and delineation wells
were drilled in the 1970s and 1980s. Field development began in the late 1980s with the installation of
a production platform bridge linked to a compression platform, and two large 40-slot satellite production
platforms. Production of the field began in December 1988. Three further satellite platforms were installed
four years later and by the early 2000s, a total of twelve (12) platforms had been installed. Production peaked
(Fig. 1) to approximately 160,000 BOPD, and the field is now producing more than 14,000 BOPD with
peak rates of around 20,000 BOPD.

Figure 1—S Field production history.

The S Field structure is a large, relatively low-relief, anticlinal complex with five (5) main culminations.
The field area covers nearly 80 km2 at the level of the original oil water contact (OOWC) at the J reservoir.
Oil (approximately 46 to 50° API) was discovered in the Miocene J, K, and Oligocene L Group sandstones,
with associated gas caps (which belong to NOC). Non-associated gas, which also belongs to NOC, was also
discovered in the Groups I, K, and L sandstones (Fig. 2). I-Group sands were never flow tested.

Figure 2—Generalized stratigraphy of the Malay Basin.

SPE-191657-MS 3

Multi-stacked reservoirs in the I, J, K, and L formations were completed with multi-packer single and
dual completions. Repeated designs were run in nearly 246 wells on 12 platforms; the sliding sleeves in
the completions provided more than 1,000 potential access points to reservoirs (Fig. 3 & 4). The original
operator focused on the major reservoirs in the field, leaving some minor stakes above the top packer.

Figure 3—Platform layout and dimensions.

Figure 4—Access points.

After acquiring the assets, the current operator‘s strategy was set to revive mature assets in the field in
the most timely and cost-effective manner. The high level of well intervention activities in the past three
years were successfully executed as part of the strategy in an effort to reactivate idle wells which managed
to offset natural annual decline (forecasted 18%) of the field. In addition to continuing basic interventions
in the field, the operator was proactively looking for potential in those minor reservoirs above the top
packer that are traditionally only accessible by workover operations. Slow drilling activities and the low oil
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price environment has created the need for an efficient and low-cost alternative to expensive rig workovers.
Therefore, the cement packer solution was reviewed as a potential approach to unlock significant BCOs.

Candidate Selection Methodology

Having such a large field and significant amount of data to process after the acquisition, the new operator
had to devise a well-by-well review process to assess every well and the reservoirs available within each
well. The output was a future plan for every well in the field, with associated production, cost, and feasibility
stated. A cross-disciplinary team was formed, consisting of subsurface, well intervention & integrity,
and production technologists together with operations and engineering teams, who took a proactive role
to support the candidate selection process. In many cases, the topside engineering would input a high
percentage of cost.
The main data sources used to evaluate the wells and reservoirs were original logs, any new log data,
production history where available, any fluid contacts, well diagrams and well history, topside status, and
platform capacities. There was also a comparison with offset wells and sand-to-sand correlations (Fig. 5).

Figure 5—Example of sand-to-sand correlation.

This allowed all the opportunities to be ranked and work divided into various subsets by work type,
equipment required, or by geographical location. The database was a live document, and as new information
became available, it was updated and rankings were changed.
One subset from the well-by-well reviews was BCOs. All BCOs were identified and divided into three
categories (Fig. 6):
1. Those that could be directly perforated, without requiring additional work before perforation
2. Those requiring additional work before perforating, within the original completion design
3. Those requiring additional work before perforating, located above the top packer (i.e., cement packer
candidates)
SPE-191657-MS 5

Figure 6—Well review workflow.

Cement Packer Candidates

Numerous potential candidates were identified for the cement packer technique. Because every well had to
be drilled through those minor reservoirs, the following screening technique was used:

• The well can only be considered for a cement packer once every other opportunity in the well has
been exhausted because a cement packer is the last opportunity in the well.
• Based on previous record in the country, dual completion string has lower chance of success as
oppose to single string. Therefore, for pilot job it is required to have single completion string.
• Validating tubing integrity, based on positive-pressure tests performed.

• Christmas tree and wellhead valves have no leaks and are in good condition.

• Once a well is considered, it will require contact logging to be performed and further review to
proceed.
• Ability to perform future well abandonment with the existing cement packer in place.

This screening process reduced the candidates considerably but still provided more than 30 potential
cement packers’ opportunities in the J reservoir minor sands. There were still some doubts about the main
reservoir I-130 quality, so the candidates were reduced to less than 5. Based on this, 2 ideal candidate wells
were finally identified which were located on the same platform.

Job Planning
Design phases consist of several concurrent tasks: offshore pre-work, onshore planning, offshore planning
and acquiring regulatory approvals. There was a significant time pressure because the operator wanted the
job to be completed during the first half of 2017, so if successful, further planning could be included during
development of the 2018 budget cycle.

Offshore Well Preparation

One of the factors was to execute within a normal operating weather window for well intervention and
to have crews work outside monsoon season – ideally an April through October work window. The pre-
work for the cement packer was brought into the front of the intervention planning to ensure there were
no issues before the CT work. The crews and equipment arrived the first week of March. Both wells had
to undergo tubing clearance checks and integrity checks by running the Multi-finger Imaging Tool (MIT).
Additionally, bottom-hole temperature (BHT) surveys for cement slurry design and laboratory tests were
6 SPE-191657-MS

conducted, including positive pressure integrity test of tubing, dummy-off all the gas lift mandrels (GLMs),
set the plug to abandon lower zones below the production packer, which were not producing, ensure proper
functionality of the sliding sleeve device (SSD), which served as the casing access window, and subsurface
safety valve (SSSV). A full critical device function test (CDFT) was performed on the tree and wellhead
as well as a pressure test against the production packer to ensure no leak path existed within the tubing/
casing annulus.
Outcome: One of the wells had a tubing integrity issue during the positive pressure test. An MIT was
run to determine where the issue was, with the belief that if it was the lower part of the tubing, the cement
retainer might have been set higher or above the leak point. Severe pitting was identified near the surface
area, so the well was eliminated as a candidate. The final candidate was approved, and the decision was
made to proceed with the pilot cement packer operation.

Onshore Planning Phase

Several cement slurry designs were repeated to obtain the optimum recipe and governed by factors, such
as circulation pressure limitation, thickening time, downhole temperature density, compressive strength,
plastic viscosity, and fluid loss parameters. This helped identify the best placement method.
During this phase, it was important for the operator, regulator, and service company to collaborate with
all the teams involved for cement selection, which included a discussion on the overall cement operation
by appointed subject matter experts. Also, according to the PETRONAS Procedures and Guidelines for
Upstream Activities, Version 4.0 (PPGUA 4.0) regulation requirement for cement packer applications, the
cement height in the casing/tubing annulus shall be at least 100 ft. (30 m) length above the uppermost
perforations. The cement volume planned was to cover 780 m inside the tubing-casing annulus section and
top of cement (TOC) was expected to be 300 m above future perforations, which fulfilled PPGUA 4.0
requirements. Due to the length of cement, there are significant variance of temperature between the bottom
of cement and top of cement. For design purpose, the thickening time need to consider the worst temperature
at the bottom of cement, and the compressive strength require to use the temperature at the top of cement.
One advantage during CT cement operations is to have longer and safer thickening time slurry design.
The lack of constraints during rig-less operations and the operator practicing concurrent operations on the
platform in such a way that waiting on cement could be sufficiently long, the team could move to the next
well to perform other work to maintain productive time while waiting on cement to set. This added value
to the thickening time of the cement slurry design and allowed room for an additional 50% setting time
as a safety factor.
To increase mixing efficiency, a cement sack conveyor was planned for installation on top of the batch
mixer to speed up cutting sacks and help reduce manual handling. Experienced cementers were involved
onshore and offshore as part of the planning and execution teams as well as the mixing and pumping team,
which greatly increased the success rate of pumping large volumes of the cement slurry through CT.
The next step was to optimize the perforating program. Perforating performance is relative to how well
the perforations are established or the quality of a flow channel from the formation into the casing area. It is
important to optimize the perforating performance by selecting the underbalanced clean perforation method
as well as using the largest possible gun charges, which in this case were 2.5-inch gun charges.
Perforating with retrievable tubing gun (RTG) assemblies, a total of 32-m length, were planned to be
deployed with a memory slick-line unit. It was equipped with a battery powered low-power electronic
firing head (trigger tool) activated via a pre-programmed sequence of time, pressure/temperature, and/or
accelerations parameters with the sole purpose of providing a safe and reliable means of activating downhole
explosives.
A full well test was planned with flowing mode all with real-time downhole gauges, safety downhole
and surface samples, surface chemistry, and boundary test.
SPE-191657-MS 7

A full operation risk assessment was detailed to cover all mitigation plans for the following challenges
identified during the teams planning job.
A Well Intervention On Paper session was then conducted with various parties involved, covering job
design, operational procedures and risk mitigation,

Offshore Operational Challenges

Some operational challenges can affect the success of the cement slurry displacement, including but not
limited to cement slurry mixing, plugging of the CT string, pump losing prime when pumping a large volume
of cement slurry through CT, which was mitigated by having a backup pump in the event of main pump
failure. Good circulation through the SSD and tubing/casing annulus has to be established to have a clear
circulation path to simulate pressure and rate conditions for the main cement-packer operation.
To optimize the time, and reduce the complexity, single trip cement retainer was used as opposed to dual
trip cement retainer. The selection of single trip cement retainer is based on vendor submission percentage
of success of its product and also failures from other operators using dual trip cement retainer.
Scale and contaminants in the tubing can be present that might affect cement bonding quality to the pipe.
The pickle technique with 7.5% HCl acid inside the CT and tubing/casing annulus was used to dissolve
any debris inside. This technique is also used to clean up the setting area inside the tubing for the cement
retainer and to prevent further a U-tube effect of the cement coming back into the tubing in the event the
cement retainer fails to hold the pressure.
Insufficient height of final TOC was discussed, so extra volume of cement was planned to cover future
perforations. The worst-case plan was to use the highest GLM as the new access window. Deck layout,
cement transfer method, chemical delivery method, pumping schedule, crew experience, cement and tooling
offshore representative's experience together with the operator's well intervention supervisor experience
were assessed and mitigated during risk assessment discussions.

Regulatory Approval Shall be Preplanned

Before work can commence, an approval process is required with NOC to accept the new cement packer
technique as a barrier for new reservoirs to be perforated.

Results
The execution summary of the CT cement-packer operational deployment that helped ensure a successful
placement is as follows:
1. Pre-cement coiled tubing unit (CTU) run inside the wellbore
– Run cement retainer and set above the existing SSD. Typically, a punch holes technique is
required to obtain access into the annulus. In this case, the existing SSD could be used for the
circulation path.
– Pressure up from CT/tubing annulus against the cement retainer for integrity check.
– Establish circulation down the SSD and tubing/casing annulus to establish clear circulation path
and simulate pressure and rate conditions for the main cement-packer operation.
– Pickle with 7.5% HCl acid inside CT and tubing/casing annulus to remove scale and
contaminants that might affect cement bonding quality to the pipe.
2. Cementing operations
– ll 72 bbl. of the 15 ppg cement slurry (twice the CT volume) was successfully pumped into
tubing/casing annulus. It was mixed homogenously inside a batch mixer to obtain consistent
slurry characteristics. A cement sample was collected for quality check and followed by heating
up a water bath to downhole temperature to simulate downhole conditions.
8 SPE-191657-MS

– Stinging out from the cement retainer was conducted on the first attempt as planned.
– Based on hydrostatic calculation, an equivalent surface pressure amount was applied on the
backside while waiting on cement to set to ensure no U-tube effect occurred into the tubing area.

Post-Cement-Packer Operation
Post-job assessment was important to ensure that tubing accessibility and the integrity of the cement-packer
system post-placement (Fig. 7). Running a CBL survey will provide assurance of the quality of isolation
of the TOC.

Figure 7—CBL of post-cement result.

CBL Run: As stated in PPGUA 4.0, solidified cement barrier needs to be verified to meet the minimum
design requirement and also the top of cement-packer should cover the cap-rock depth for future well
abandonment plan. A memory slick-line CBL survey was conducted, which showed good bond.

Technical Success
The cement packer was successfully placed below budget and ahead of schedule. The offshore execution
was safely completed without any issues and the TOC was found to be within a few feet of planned depth.
This is largely contributed to the quality of all the pre-work, having fully empowered teams and a clear
execution plan set, which everyone involved knew and understood. The extra effort to ensure the correct
people were offshore, who fully appreciated the importance of this job, was also key to the success.

Procedural Success
The process of identifying the well candidate has involved the same key people from the operator. Once
in the planning stage, managing service provider was challenging as this was the first cement packer job
in the country, the key personnel from the operator, service company and NOC were always in close
communication. This allowed a quick decision-making process and necessary approvals obtained without
delays. By working several cycle in all aspects between the planning, technical and operational risk, all case
histories lessons learnt successfully incorporated and mitigated.
Leveraging IIWR contract through risk sharing integrated operations which were already in place, it
took less than 6 months from initial idea to execution to occur. To evaluate the same prospect using a
workover unit would take minimum 12 to 18 months because of extra approvals, studies for workovers, and
contracting, not to mention costs associated with workover operations compared to rig-less operations.
SPE-191657-MS 9

Future Opportunities
The key success of this technology is the high potential for the operator. The current field is one of the
largest in Malaysia. Having a large number of such opportunities provides a valuable economical solution
to dramatically improve efficiencies, which would further improve the economics of the field development.
The operator has proved with other well intervention technologies the advantage of a factory efficient
approach, during the peak operations working of 18 wells with just one CTU in one month. This style of
batch work would fit perfectly with the cement-packer technology. Going forward, all pre-work will be
completed before the CT package arrives to location; it will just be used to run the cement packer on all
relevant wells, then demobilize. Slickline will then perforate all cement packers. To optimize further, the
topside maintenance team could also be on platform during the cement-packer operations installing the
flow-lines. This strategy is currently being reviewed by the operator.

Conclusions
This is not a new technology and possibly not the only solution for accessing BCOs above the top packer.
In this case, the new conservative technique was a total success for the operator. It allowed an unknown
reservoir to be tested for 10% of the cost of a workover operation. The operator sees the cement packer as
a good tool for this type of appraisal work, for which the subsurface uncertainty does not justify workover
campaigns. This technology also only works where there are no other opportunities left in the well; this
is the last use of the production string before abandonment. The technology has its limitations; however,
in a field where there are 80% idle wells, this could unlock a significant amount of reserves that might be
uneconomical to work over.

Acknowledgements
The authors gratefully acknowledge permission from EnQuest Malaysia, Halliburton, and PETRONAS
to publish this paper. Our biggest gratitude is also given to all the parties who kindly provided valuable
comments and input during the preparation of this paper.

Nomenclatures
API = American Petroleum Institute
BCOs = Behind-casing opportunities
BHT = Bottom-hole temperature
BOPD = Barrels of oil per day
CBL = Cement bond log
CDFT = Critical device function test
CT = Coiled tubing
CTU = Coiled tubing unit
GLMs = Gas lift mandrels
HCl = Hydrochloric
IIWR = Integrated Idle Well Restoration
MIT = Multi-finger Imaging Tool
NOC = National oil company
OOWC = Original oil water contact
ppg = Pounds per gallon (lb/gal)
PPGUA = PETRONAS Procedures and Guidelines for Upstream Activities
RTG = Retrievable tubing gun
SSD = Sliding sleeve device
10 SPE-191657-MS

SSSV = Subsurface safety valve

TOC = Top of cement

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