Offshore Rigless Coiled Tubing Operations Drives a Paradigm Shift of Cost-Effective Interventions in Gulf of Suez, Egypt

Abstract Gulf of Suez is one of the prolific Oil & gas areas in the world. Oil Production in this area started as early as 1960s when Giant Morgan Field was discovered and followed by discoveries of Small to Moderate size Fields in the same basin. and like any aging basin as time goes on well interventions become vital for maintaining a sustainable production and coiled tubing is no exception in this regard. which drives petroleum engineers to find solutions to do cost effective well interventions that can extend life of a mature field. By that time of exploration and development of Gulf of Suez fields, the basis of design of many offshore structures were different from what we would do today. That many fields were developed using smaller satellite platforms with limited space and limited loading capacity of working deck. this mode of design in addition to the normal aging of platforms lead to a generalized procedure for coiled tubing operations whenever needed; that requires barge or rig assistance to accommodate the necessary coiled tubing equipment. Few trials across history were made to do rigless coiled tubing operations in larger platforms that may have crane to support coiled tubing record, however these practices were stopped due to tedious and heavy logistics, and limited capabilities of the set up that operations were limited to jetting operations. Adding the cost of barge or rig to coiled tubing operations drives the cost high and restrict the applicability to high certainty value intervention and many other uncertain opportunities will be overlooked due to inherent cost. In order to give chance to do moderate to high operationally risky wells with high uncertainty in subsurface value it was necessary to find alternative rigless approaches. During 2022 & 2023 a multidisciplinary analysis was done to explore innovative options to do rigless coiled tubing operations considering all the constraints through layout optimization, new technology to accommodate coiled tubing rig ups and logistics optimization & comparative evaluation of different options to deliver cost effective intervention. Many of the locations analyzed were confirmed feasible for the new setup of offshore rigless interventions and proof of concept campaigns commenced testing the operations on larger platforms then smaller ones. by the time of writing the abstract 4 Coiled tubing campaigns were completed rigless and succeeded to add more than 6500 BOPD & achieve savings of more than 10 M$. Revision of well intervention strategies and procedures in mature offshore fields can lead to a huge cost saving as well as a production leap.