Bahrain Petroleum Company (Bapco) announced that it had successfully completed the drilling of 30 horizontal and deviated wells in the first half of 2009. This brings to 64 the total number of non-vertical wells drilled in the Bahrain field using state-of-the-art directional, horizontal and re-entry technology
The latest wells are part of a wider nationwide development drilling programme.
Directional wells are normally drilled any where from 0-75 degrees of vertical axis at pre-determined stages. Horizontal wells, on the other hand, are taken beyond directional limits and are landed to 90 degrees horizontally, whereby the wells will look like an ‘L’ letter. This exposes the same oil bearing formation as vertical wells, but at much higher intervals equal to the horizontal length. Bapco has drilled many horizontal wells with the lateral hole section varying from 100 feet to almost 3000 feet.
Re-entry type wells are made from existing vertical wells where a new or horizontal section or even sections are added to make the well horizontal. This is achieved by cutting through the wall of the existing wells at a depth pre-determined by the petroleum engineers and departing with a 90 degrees horizontal section of the desired length.
All these types of wells are drilled using a highly specialised technology in which the directional or horizontal sections are placed exactly in the desired oil bearing formations by use of special bottom hole assemblies and logging tools.
Bapco has drilled all these types of wells in the past 10 years and has had great success in increasing individual wells production by various folds.
Directional and horizontal wells in the Bahrain field targeted many geological formations of different thicknesses in shallow and medium deep targets such as Ahmedi, Bahrain, Wara and Arab formation. The total drilled footage in these horizontal and directional wells to this date has reached an approximate 234,000 feet with lateral sections of nearly 64,000 feet.
The planning and execution of these challenging wells was all done in-house by Bapco petroleum engineers and geoscientists.
This comes as part of Bapco’s long and rich history in drilling and production operations, especially with its legacy of being the first Gulf State to discover oil in 1932.
