Plenary and Panel Sessions
Sunday, 9 October 2011, 1000–1200 hours
Executive Plenary Session: Industry Collaborative
Strategies to Optimise Recovery
This plenary session will focus on the necessity of collaboration within our industry to ensure we are efficiently and effectively producing our hydrocarbon resources. This collaboration may be in the form of IOC/NOC partnerships with industry organisations, service providers, academia and national research organisations. Also, associating with other technology-intensive industries, such as bio-medical, aerospace, automotive, software industries may initiate a new era of innovation, knowledge diffusion and technology integration.
Monday, 10 October 2011, 1030–1230 hours
Panel Session 1: Characterisation and Modelling Challenges of
EOR in Carbonate Reservoirs
Carbonate reservoirs are highly heterogeneous, with triple porosity systems (matrix-vugs-fracture) and mixed to oil-wet characteristics. These characteristics result in uncertainties in reservoir performance, recovery efficiency predictions and the choice of EOR process.
Only a small fraction of worldwide EOR projects have been implemented in carbonate reservoirs. This is partly due to the lack of understanding of the key factors that affect fluid flow in carbonates (e.g. fluid type, pore network structure, reservoir heterogeneity, drive mechanism, wettability). Geological heterogeneity and wettability impact the remaining oil saturation and hence oil recovery and sweep efficiency. Limited success or failure of secondary waterfloods and tertiary EOR floods in carbonates is often due to an incomplete understanding of these factors.
This panel session will discuss recent advances in reservoir characterisation, modelling and EOR technologies for carbonates, focusing on the need to improve our understanding of the displacement processes in carbonate reservoirs, the development of new workflows for characterisation and modelling and identifying potential EOR processes to improve oil recovery and sweep efficiency.
Tuesday, 11 October 2011, 1030–1230 hours
Panel Session 2: Integrated Approach to Meet Characterisation Modelling Challenges
The optimum oil recovery requires best reservoir characterisation by implementing the cutting edge technologies of geoscience and engineering to clearly define the key reservoir parameters and build high resolution geological and reservoir models.
Software and hardware continue to advance, allowing construction of larger and more detailed models. Significant advances have been made connecting geophysical and petrophysical data to build 3D geoscience model and integrating it with reservoir model. Parallel simulation has enabled us to significantly reduce the simulation run time and advancement in visualisation software has helped us to review the models from different perspectives. Recent advancement includes coupled geo-mechanical modelling to incorporate changes in rock properties with pressure.
The technology that defines key reservoir parameters (K, Φ, Sw) is still evolving, and many challenges are yet to be addressed, particularly to unlock hydrocarbon potential from complex and unconventional reservoirs and to identify the remaining oil in maturing fields. Uncertainty in input data is still a problem and history matching the dynamic behaviour is still challenging.
Few key elements which need to be addressed to reduce uncertainties of reservoir characterisation and modelling include:
- Improve seismic resolution to solve manly reservoir issues like thin bed and hetrogenous reservoirs
- Improve cross well imaging technique to track bypassed oil more efficiently
- Improve techniques to resolve issues related to loss of resolution during grid upscaling
- Improve methods to obtain residual oil saturation
- Upscaling of core flood relative permeability to model grid scale
