Small Fields Evaluation - New Concept, Gulf of Suez, Egypt

By

 Mahmoud Sabry Ibrahim¹

(1) Petroleum Company, Cairo, Egypt

 The EEMM field is located on the southwest side of the Gulf of Suez. Magawish was formed after the announcement of commercial production in 1995 from well EEMM-2 with average rate of 180 B/D.

The first well drilled in the Magawish concession FE 87-9 in 1988, tested 400 B/D from fractured Basement and was then abandoned.

Later Total decided to relinquish the concession being non-economic to exploit. Several other exploration companies acquired the concession and they all reached the same conclusion as Total.

In 1997, Magawish decided to exploit the proven potential of well FE 87-9. A twin well EEMM-1A was drilled from the existing well course by sidetracking. This well produced 2500 B/D.

In 1998, a strategic development plan was designed to deal with the difficult conditions of developing such reservoir with old seismic data in hand.

The main objective of this plan was to determine the future size of the company. The concept used in this phase was drilling a few exploratory wells to delineate the possible potential areas, while in the next phase the concept was to drill more wells using the step- by- step approach. In the first phase, two exploratory and one development wells were drilled leading to two discoveries. The production of the company increased more than 100 % and the reserves were increased drastically.

This phase was decisive in determining the size of the company and its production facilities.