There is a continual effort to search for different forms of green energy to facilitate the energy transition. In the northern part of Bornea, solar is currently an attractive renewable energy option. The location, however, is in a tropical environment with limited access to ground space. This limits the deployment of solar power generation, justifying a need to search for an alternative green way of generating electricity.
Repurposing existing oil and gas facilities instead of decommissioning them to generate electricity as an additional stream of revenue is an attractive option. That could unlock a significant source of green energy to generate another stream of value by keeping the same workforce that is skilled in the fossil fuel industry by using oil and gas facilities.
The Northern part of Borneo is mainly controlled by a complex interaction between the tectonics of Southeast Asia and the deltaic systems, resulting in the presence of basinwide overpressured formation water. A pore pressure profile of some of drilled wells in the region reveals a ramp in the pore pressure profile after which the magnitude of the pore pressure nears the lithostatic pressure, implying the presence of high brine pressure. The overpressure formation is basinwide, but the depth at which the overpressure formation is present varies geographically.
Drilling into such formations has always been disappointing from a hydrocarbon-exploration point of view because they imply compromised traps. If we change our perspective, however, and not necessary look for hydrocarbon as the only source of energy, then these formations could have the potential to provide a new source of green energy by extracting the kinetic and thermal energy of the overpressured brine.
This paper presents efforts and details of a pilot trial that was planned and executed to demonstrate the concept of repurposing existing wells into electricity generators instead of abandoning them. The paper shares a workflow that can be added to an existing abandonment workflow for repurposing wells and generating electricity. The presented concept could be used in the industry to enable concurrent electricity generation while producing hydrocarbon from existing or newly completed wells.