Traditionally, the Gulf of Thailand (GoT) has been known for high temperature, small borehole size, variable CO2, and highly compartmentalized reservoirs. In particular, it is a very challenging environment for Wireline Formation Testers. Owing to cost constraints, since the start of exploration and development campaigns in this area, usage of newer technologies has been highly selective. However, this has been changed significantly in the past few years where the right wireline technology has been applied to the right environment. This paper is the first to present a work process to derive clean fluid sampling in the very challenging environment of the GoT.

Time per station used to collect downhole fluid samples using wireline formation testing has been a major concern for a costly offshore operation. In addition, borehole stability is also another factor limiting wireline formation test time. Given the time constraint, collected fluid samples usually have high drilling mud filtrate contaminations, in the ranges of 25 to 85wt%, and have not been suitable for further laboratory analysis and field development purpose. Balancing between the time used for fluid sampling and the quality of the collected fluid samples is not a simple task to manage.

This paper shares a successful story of downhole fluid sampling in exploration wells for one of the operators in the GoT. Instead of using a conventional probe with one Downhole Fluid Analyzer (DFA), the concentric shaped probe with two synchronized pump-out modules and two DFAs are used in this case. However, this is not as simple as other fields already presented in the literature because an unconsolidated sand character introduced complications into this sampling technique. Several attempts have been developed to make focused sampling work in these challenging environments. At the end, “Less than 5% OBM contaminated samples in oil reservoirs are successfully achieved in a timely manner.” The average time used per each sampling station is approximately 30 minutes. This paper will also discuss the advantages and disadvantages for each technique applied and the final results. In addition, more improvements have been suggested to enhance this focused sample technology in more complex fluids, such as gas condensate reservoirs to make sure that less contaminated fluid sample can be collected in the limited time per station