As the life of an oil and gas reservoir goes through its maturation phases, various recovery techniques for enhanced production are employed.
Integration of subsurface reservoir knowledge and well engineering disciplines can aid throughout the field life and optimise recovery. As the life of a hydrocarbon reservoir goes through its maturation phases, various recovery techniques are employed from primary, secondary through to tertiary Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) to maintain production at maximum levels. The primary importance of these techniques is to force hydrocarbons into the wellbore increasing the production.
Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) can be divided into two major types of techniques:
- Thermal and
- Non-thermal recovery
both of which AGR professionals have extensive knowledge and experience.
We have worked and supported various projects for our clients world-wide from the initial EOR screening, through to Pilot Projects and extending in advising full-field implementation. We have written about a chemical EOR project executed in East Africa previously, this update concentrates on thermal recovery methods applied for the field development plan of Venezuela heavy oil fields.
The scope for our Reservoir Management team included the reservoir simulation model construction for thermal recovery methods and screening of thermal production techniques, such as Cyclic Steam Injection, Steam Flooding and Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage (SAGD).
It also included the evaluation of the reservoir simulation model and forecast profiles of a third party. Using the sector model with multi-well configuration, the optimisation of well patterns and sensitivity study of thermal production was investigated to maximise the oil recovery factor. Furthermore, the production profiles for large scale commercial field development (200,000 STBD ~ 400,000 STBD) was generated for the economic assessment.
As a result, our client was provided with a reservoir simulation model constructed for thermal recovery method, a summary of production techniques for increased heavy oil production and evaluation of EOR techniques for their Field Development Plan. The key enabler for the project was a close partnership with the client, a large Eastern Asian national oil company, ensuring the direct discussions between the projects teams and weekly progress meetings making sure the progress was in line with the work plan and client’s expectations. In order to speed up the execution of the simulation models, parallel licenses were used.
