Can Integrated Reservoir Management And Technology Enhance Performance of Water And Gas Floods?
Authors: Thakur G.C. 
Published: March 2010

This paper outlines critical reservoir management issues and technical areas for effectively managing water and gas floods. A tie between reservoir modelling and performance prediction and decision analysis is illustrated. Case studies are discussed to show the contributions of new and integrated technologies to effective reservoir management. In summary, the companies with a technological leadership position in this area are beginning to harvest the fruits of their actions.

Introduction

Integrated reservoir management and technology are being increasing applied to maximize economic recovery of oil and gas. The need to enhance recovery from the vast amount of remaining oil- and gas-in-place from existing reservoirs and to maximize recovery from newly discovered fields require the use of integrated technologies and better reservoir management practices(1), Historically, some form of reservoir management has been practiced when a major expenditure is planned, such as a new field development or waterflood installation. The reservoir management practices in these instances most often were not integrated, i.e., different disciplines did their own work separately. During the last five years, however, greater emphasis has been placed on synergism between various functional disciplines, and many companies practicing this are benefiting from their synergistic activities(2). Manyleading-edge technological advances have now been made in geophysics, geology, petrophysics, and reservoir and operations engineering. Mainframe super computers, more powerful personal computers, and workstations are providing ever increasing computing power. Integrated, life-cycle, database-management systems are also being developed and deployed. Integrated, interactive 3D reservoir modelling and simulation assist in describing reservoir geometry and property distribution. In addition, integrated 3D graphics workstations and parallel processors provide the tools to achieve reservoir characterization and modelling efficiently by reviewing the simulation results with other reservoir descriptions and static data and by changing the model, if necessary. Thus, it is now possible for geoscientists and engineers to use new developments in geologic modelling and geostatistical techniques to build a 3D model from static data and edit the model while history matching dynamic data.

Combining geostatistical reservoir characterization with high resolution 3D seismic interpretation provides a new dimension in accurately modelling the reservoir. On the other hand, new technologies such as hybrid simulation and scale up provide alternatives to a large-scale computer simulation, yet retaining the geologic heterogeneities in the model. This paper first describes major elements of a successful reservoir management program, and then documents case studies illustrating sound reservoir management and decision analysis practices pertaining to water- and gasflood projects.

Elements of Successful Reservoir Management (1)

The major elements of a successful reservoir management program are identified below.

Data Collection and Management

Data collection and management are very important to project success. A clear understanding of the purpose and application of the data is needed, i.e., define why the information is needed and how it is to be used. A cost-benefit analysis of the data, that is, the cost of data collection and management and the benefits to be derived, is mandatory.