Sabah Shell Petroleum Co. Ltd. has conducted further development drilling at Kinabalu field in the South China Sea off Sabah.
The field, operated remotely from Shell's Labuan crude oil terminal on Labuan Island 55 km away, is Malaysia's first unmanned development. Kinabalu started up on Dec. 25, 1997.
Production averaged 33,300 b/d in 1998 and about 27,800 b/d last year. It was flowing about 31,000 b/d of 34° gravity oil from Miocene at about 9,000 ft subsea in late 1999, when a jack-up arrived to drill two new wells and work over one well.
Sabah Shell crews visit the four-leg drilling/production platform about three days per week to carry out planned maintenance.
Oil is shipped from the field on Block SB-1 near the Brunei border by pipeline to Samarang field for commingling and processing with Samarang crude. Sabah Shell relinquished Samarang field to state-owned Petronas Carigali in early 1995. Kinabalu interests are Sabah Shell 80% and Petronas 20%.
Kinabalu oil and gas production rates are constrained by available capacity at Samarang. Peak facilities design capacities are 60,000 bo/d and 42 MMscfd of gas.
Kinabalu, in 55 m of water, has Main, East, and Deep accumulations with combined original oil in place of about 500 million bbl. The early development targets Kinabalu Main with about 99 million st-tk bbl of oil. Sabah Shell is using horizontal and multilateral wells exclusively to develop the field. The company discovered the field in 1989.
