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Oil & Gas Science and Technology – Rev. IFP, Vol. 57 (2002), No. 3, pp. 251-258

Oil & Gas Science and Technology – Rev. IFP, Vol. 57 (2002), No. 3, pp. 251-258 Copyright © 2002, Éditions Technip Integrated Reservoir Management: A Powerful Method to Add Value to Companies’ Assets. A Modern View of the EOR Techniques F . Kalaydjian1 and B. Bourbiaux1 1 Institut français du pétrole, 1 et 4, avenue de Bois-Préau, 92852 Rueil-Malmaison Cedex - France e-mail: francois.kalaydjian@ifp.fr - bernard.bourbiaux@ifp.fr Résumé — Gestion intégrée des réservoirs : une méthode performante pour accroître la valeur des réserves des compagnies pétrolières. Une conception moderne des méthodes de récupération assistée — La gestion intégrée des réservoirs est une méthode attractive permettant d’accroître la valeur des réserves des compagnies pétrolières. Augmenter les réserves de gisements en cours de production par l'utilisation d’une stratégie de développement optimisée constitue en effet, pour les compagnies pétrolières, une réelle opportunité et une alternative intéressante à des campagnes d’exploration coûteuses et risquées. La gestion intégrée des réservoirs est, dans son principe, une façon de combiner des méthodologies et des technologies telles que la caractérisation de réservoir, l’utilisation d’architectures complexes de puits, les méthodes avancées de mesures pétrophysiques, le monitoring des réservoirs, ou encore, la simulation de réservoir, et de créer entre elles une réelle synergie. Du fait des avancées très significatives observées dans le domaine de l’informatique, la gestion intégrée des réservoirs se conçoit également comme une gestion en temps réel. L’énorme quantité d’informations acquises durant la production d’un réservoir peut ainsi être utilisée pour développer la compréhension de son organisation, remettre à jour le modèle géologique qui le décrit, réduire les incertitudes, concevoir l’architecture de production la plus appropriée, garantir la productivité et l’injectivité des puits, identifier et cibler des poches d’huile non drainées, sélectionner le procédé de récupération le plus adapté dans le but final d’accroître le taux de récupération. La plupart des éléments d’une telle stratégie sont déjà disponibles, mais ce qu’il reste à développer est la façon de les combiner afin de construire un réel système intégré. Celui-ci constituera certainement un outil majeur dans la panoplie de l’ingénieur de production de demain. Dans cet article, nous passons en revue et illustrons les différents ingrédients de ce système intégré. Abstract — Integrated Reservoir Management: A Powerful Method to Add Value to Companies’ Assets. A Modern View of the EOR Techniques — Integrated reservoir management is an attractive process to add value to the oil companies’ assets. Indeed, increasing the reserves of their reservoirs already in production through an improved development strategy constitutes for the oil companies a real opportunity and an economic alternative to costly and risky exploration surveys. Oil & Gas Science and Technology – Rev. IFP, Vol. 57 (2002), No. 3 INTRODUCTION Increasing the recovery of the reservoirs has always been a concern for oil companies. Indeed, complementarily to what costly and risky exploration surveys can add as new reserves, a way for the oil companies to increase their reserves is to improve the recovery factor of the reservoirs they are currently producing. Twenty years ago, enhancing oil recovery meant designing a specific advanced recovery method, such as a polymer or miscible flooding [1]. With only a partial knowledge of the structure of a given reservoir, the strategy to increase the recovery factor often relied on the hope to find an appropriate recovery process or even a product to be injected which would improve the sweeping efficiency, either by modifying the mobility ratio (polymer flooding) or by lowering the interfacial tension with the oil (surfactant or miscible gas flooding). The reservoir engineer relied mainly on the result of the reservoir simulations which were taken for granted. Some good success was met sometimes. Some quite disappointing jobs were also recorded and required to frequently revisit the reservoir model to match unexpected production results. Poor predictivity of the reservoir simulations was mainly due to the fact that the reservoir architecture, e.g. the distribution of the producing lithofacies, was poorly understood or poorly accounted for in the reservoir simulations. Uncertainties in the geological model were not considered as building the main contribution to the overall uncertainty in the management strategy of a given reservoir. The following years were characterized by a depressed oil market which led the oil industry to draw the best profit of existing techniques. Cost reduction objectives became the leitmotiv of many development projects and led to major progress in techniques and practices which, previously, were not considered as factors of oil recovery enhancement. Nowadays, EOR is acknowledged as resulting from the synergy of new and advanced techniques on one hand and integrated reservoir management approaches on the other hand. In addition to cost reduction the oil companies are faced —from day one—with the necessity to shorten the time spanning between the appraisal and the production of the first oil or required when comes the decision to redevelop a field or produce its satellites. As such, instead of being worked out in a successive manner, projects have to be executed by multidisciplinary teams using sometimes parallel engineering methods. Therefore, for some years, the geologists, geophysicists, petrophysicists and reservoir engineers have learned how to work together in multi- disciplinary teams to tackle both exploration and production issues. To this end, it was necessary for them to share a common language and common concepts. Recently, new tools showed up to help that collaborative work. They are the reality centers. Through the integration of the various softwares which are being used in reservoir characterization and reservoir simulation they do allow to visualize in 3D the structure of the reservoirs as well as the displacement of the fluids. In the same room, the different members of a team can test various development scenarios, quantify the associated productions and eventually come to an optimum. Shortening the time required to make decisions will lead in a near future to define not only an improved but a real time reservoir management. Already, the concept of an “electric field” has been defined [2]. It consists in acquiring on a regular basis measurements on various parameters such as pressure or temperature but also variation in saturation through the use of time lapse (or 4D) seismics. It will consist also as soon as some significant progress will have been made in that respect, in triggering down-hole intelligent completions and modify thus in real time the production schemes to optimize the daily production. 252 Integrated reservoir management is basically a way of combining complementary approaches and techniques such as reservoir characterization, use of complex well architecture, special core analysis design of recovery processes, reservoir monitoring and reservoir simulation, and creating a positive synergy between them. Thanks to the advances that have been observed in the domain of the computer science, reservoir management means also real time management. Thus, the large amount of data acquired can be while producing a reservoir used to develop the knowledge of the reservoir, update the reservoir model, reduce the underlying uncertainties, design the most suitable production architecture, ensure the productivity and the injectivity of the wells, target bypassed zones, select the most appropriate recovery process, and hence, increase the overall recovery. Most of the ingredients of such a strategy are already available. What still needs to be developed is a productive way of linking those ingredients together to build an integrated system. Such a system, when made available will constitute a major toolkit in the toolbox of the production engineers. In this paper, we review and illustrate the different ingredients that have to be included in such an integrated system. F Kalaydjian and B Bourbiaux / Integrated Reservoir Management The reservoir management process becomes thus an actual dynamic process. While acquiring data during the exploration stage, then the production stage, the reservoir knowledge about its structure, its ability to be flooded by the fluids is increased. This helps in updating the modeling of the reservoir and improves the reliability of the production forecasts. 1 THE RESERVOIR MANAGEMENT ISSUES Basically, there are five main contributors to an integrated reservoir management: – well design and management; – reservoir characterization; – reservoir modeling; – surface facilities design; – economics. In the following, we will insist on the first three. Integrating those three items allows to propose and design efficient and economic ways of producing reservoirs and add value to companies assets (as schematically represented in Figure 1). 1.1 Well Design and Management In order to optimize the production and increase the reserves, the exploitation of the reservoirs through complex wells [3] (horizontal wells, ERD (Extended Reach Drilling) wells, multibranched wells) has become the common practice. The major drilling progress performed during the last ten years has led to multiple options for well design: stacked multi- branch well, dual opposing laterals, re-entry laterals from a vertical well, cluster well, multidrain or multilateral well, even 3D wells for reservoirs with a complex structure or sparsely-distributed reservoir bodies. Such wells have many advantages over conventional vertical wells: – their injectivity/productivity is increased and their investigated area is larger, which allows to drill fewer wells; – they enable to add reserves uploads/Management/ kalaydjian-v57n3.pdf