Objective
The recovery factor in light oil reservoirs is on average about 35% of the Original Oil in Place (OOIP) after primary and secondary production. Therefore large volumes of oil are left behind mainly due to heterogeneous permeability distribution. This oil is found as microdistributions (remaining oil) in the swept volumes and as larger unswept oil banks in the shadow of large impermeabilities. The project aims to demonstrate a new methodology, based on combining conventional geochemical data with advanced numerical modeling, which leads to improved characterization of oil reservoirs. In particular, the new technology will be applied on Veslefrikk and Varg North Sea fields, and should result in detection of unswept oil volumes and determination of oil and water lateral drainage patterns in the reservoir, by exploiting natural variations in oil and water composition, using both organic and inorganic natural oil components. This method could then be integrated together with the information obtained from 4-D seismic and production logging surveys on drainage patterns and remaining oil. Such information will lead to the selective pick-up of unswept oil banks by targeted flexible branched infill wells.
The oil and the water of a reservoir contain in addition to H2O and hydrocarbons several other naturally occuring organic and inorganic components. Some of them are soluble only in oil, some only in water and some partition between oil and water.The oil companies monitor routinely the composition of the produced fluid and consequently there are available data concerning the presence and the concentration of these components in time and space. The proposed technology exploits the knowledge of these geochemical data to improve the description of oil reservoirs. In particular, comparison of the current composition of the produced fluids with the initial compositional map of a reservoir, which is established from the early production data, can result in an improved dynamic understanding of the reservoir. Of special interest is the determination of the flow paths of the hydrocarbons which is essential when planning placement of new injection and production wells. This knowledge is obtained using conventional reservoir simulation models by history matching the production data coupled with advanced mathematical optimisation techniques. Furthermore, the project will use numerical models to determine sea water fraction in produced water taking into consideration high ion exchange capacity and salt precipitation during transport of sea water from the injector to the producer in order to improve the drainage patterns of water and hydrocarbons.
In addition to the improvement of the understanding of the reservoir dynamics, the knowledge of the concentration profiles leads also to the detection and quantification of unswept oil banks. This goal is achieved by analysing the concentration profiles of selected organic components in the produced water during the secondary recovery (i.e. following the waterflood). The method is based on the fact that these organic components partition between oil and water with well defined partition and diffusion coefficients.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- humanitieshistory and archaeologyhistory
- natural scienceschemical sciencesorganic chemistryhydrocarbons
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Topic(s)
Call for proposal
Data not availableFunding Scheme
DEM - Demonstration contractsCoordinator
15310 Attikis
Greece