Synergizing Planning and Technology: Achieve World-Class Drilling Performance: A Suriname Deep-Water Exploration Project Case Study

Abstract PETRONAS Suriname explored for oil in Block 52 in the deep waters off Suriname. This block covers an area of 4,749 km2. The project, located north of Paramaribo, Suriname's capital city, within the prospective Suriname-Guyana basin, contains three wells. The project required drilling 5-km-deep exploration wells to gather essential subsurface data. The data will serve to determine the existence of oil and the length of the prospective oil reservoir. The engineering design and implementation stages involved many challenges because the offset wells in nearby blocks experienced well control incidents, low rate of penetration (ROP), stuck wireline string events due to unconsolidated sands, and wellbore instability issues. All of these issues were major obstacles from planning and execution perspectives. The engineering team, along with the integration service provider, collaborated in the design phase and used innovative engineering solutions for bit selections, bottomhole assemblies design, and optimum drilling fluid selection along with the use of the latest technologies for formation evaluation. Each component of the well design was analyzed to ensure optimum design and a safe operational limit with extensive risk assessment of all potential hazards along with prevention and alleviation plans.