As the Khurais mega project added 1.2 million barrels per day (bpd) of oil to the Kingdom's energy stream, the Southern Area Production Engineering and Production Services Departments (SAPED and SAPSD) have prepared more than 400 wells required to bring the project on line. The two departments were responsible for 232 oil-producer, 119 water-injector and 58 observation wells and were in charge of the massive stimulation campaign, and the installation and testing of the electrical submersible pumps. The stimulation campaign covered 118 power-water injectors and 14 oil producers, and included pumping 12 million gallons of stimulation fluid over a reservoir contact area of 160 km. Those jobs required more than 340,000 work-hours and 1.5 million km of driving. Post-stimulation tests of the new rigless coiled-tubing technique confirmed injectivity rates exceeding those of the conventional technique, which used the drilling rig pipe, by threefold. In a first for Saudi Aramco, distributed temperature sensors combined with multilateral tools were used in multiple reservoir access wells. One of the major challenges was the large number of submersible pump installations requiring on site engineering support for up to six simultaneous installations. Over the course of the project, the time needed for pump installations was reduced by 25 percent through the application of lessons learned and best practices from recent projects. Khurais also employs the most advanced application of the I-Field concept. Building on previous I-Field experiences, Khurais has broken new ground in field-monitoring and remote-control capabilities. The field is supported by a new SAPED I-Field Data Management Group and equipped with the latest technologies in surface and subsurface equipment such as permanent down hole monitoring sensors, remote-control chokes and multiphase flow meters. The data is sent through a remote terminal unit at the well site to the field producing facility control room and eventually to the production engineer's desktop at ‘Udhailiyah and Abqaiq, where it is validated, summarized and visualized, according to a latest report carried by Saudi Aramco's website.
