Pakistan Petroleum Limited (PPL) has achieved a major milestone in November with net PPL production once again crossing the 1 bcfe/day-mark, resulting in an overall production increase of more than 10 percent during the current year as compared to 2014-2015. This has been made possible largely due to the company's structural reorganisation to an asset-based hybrid set-up in mid-2015, enabling renewed focus to optimise reserve replacement and production from mature assets and fields.
Notable among these are drilling a record 23 operated wells (including 11 development wells with four each in Sui and Kandhkot, two in Adhi and one in Gambat South), maximising production efficiencies mainly through revamping of Sui compressors and work over jobs on existing wells in various fields and commissioning of new production facilities at Adhi and Gambat South.
With respect to PPL's mature assets, this entailed arresting the annual historic production decline of 6 percent from PPL's flagship Sui Gas Field as well as reversing the decline with production being approximately 5 percent higher than 2014-2015, increasing gross production from Adhi and Kandhkot fields from 84MMscfde and 159MMscfde in 2014-2015 to 111MMscfde and 203MMscfde, respectively, in 2016-2017.
Looking to the future, PPL continues to improve production efficiencies and implement an aggressive exploration programme to enhance production while maintaining a healthy reserve replacement ratio. During 2015-2016, for instance, the company made six discoveries and drilled 12 exploratory wells in operated blocks and achieved 127 percent reserve replacement ratio.