Agenda

Currently, most of the world’s oil production come from mature fields. Increasing oil recovery from aging resources and adapting to the changing economic climate are major concerns for oil companies and authorities. In addition, the rate of replacement of produced reserves by new discoveries have been declining steadily over time. Therefore, increasing recovery factors from mature fields under conventional production will be critical to meet the growing energy demand in the coming years. Many companies have been addressing these challenges by focusing on investment opportunities to maximise oil reserves recovered, extend the life of fields, increasing the recovery factor, maintaining production, and increasing the returns on older investments.

As IOR/EOR become gradually more significant for mature field development, the oil industry continuously faces challenges in operations and management of EOR projects globally. These include technical issues such as the complicated nature of oil and gas reservoir and rock and fluid properties; and commercial concerns related to the high cost of EOR and volatility of the oil price.

This session will cover topics discussing these challenges and examples of what companies are doing to address them.

Reservoir characterisation is a broad discipline of geosciences and engineering branches. The integration of formation evaluation, petrophysical characterisation, geological studies, geophysical interpretations, and engineering characterisations are the main content of reservoir characterisation. For mature fields, models generated by reservoir characterisation studies are always controlled / validated by dynamic data and become very effective in optimising production of field development management.

This session will share experiences, successes and challenges, and lessons learnt from reservoir characterisation and modelling for mature fields.  The key topics of this section are studies and practices of geological, geophysical, fluid, and integrated reservoir modelling such as:

• Methods and case studies to efficiently find and develop the remaining production potential of mature fields
• New or improved reservoir characterisation methods for reservoir modelling, and for evaluation of IOR / EOR applications, including application of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning in predicting reservoir properties

This session will highlight EOR techniques and emerging technologies that can improve EOR efficiency, in both conventional and unconventional reservoirs. It aims to cover all phases of application from technology/method screening, laboratory experiments, reservoir simulation, and field implementation. Insights and lessons learnt from advanced case studies on EOR applications will also be discussed. Key topics will cover:

• Successes and/or failures of EOR implementation
• Modification and/or combination of EOR techniques
• Researches in new EOR techniques

Mature fields impose various challenges; water and sand production, souring, production system bottleneck, high production cost; just to name a few. These challenges continue to hinder operators from maximising the value of their assets.

The big question is – How does the industry sustain production of a declining mature field? There are many opportunities to address this, such as through holistic strategies addressing subsurface and surface aspects of the asset, utilisation of artificial intelligence to ease opportunities for identification and generation, and proven technologies to boost asset value.

This session will discuss the case studies and innovative approaches in reservoir management, and production technologies applied worldwide to overcome mature field challenges.

Secondary recovery implementation is a complex process, and successful applications need to be tailored to specific reservoir properties. Successful application of secondary recovery methods, such as through water or gas injection, can lead to significant increase of the recovery factor.

Secondary recovery methods are widely used due to lower investment requirements as compared to tertiary recovery methods, especially for marginal and small offshore fields. The key elements of an effective secondary recovery programme include surveillance and specific reservoir data acquisitions, flood performance, and simulation study of the process.

This session will focus on secondary recovery applications in (but not restricted to) various cases in Vietnam, ranging from water and gas injection to naturally fractured basement reservoirs, dry gas injection in condensate rich reservoirs, with an emphasis on the design of the process and lessons learnt from real field experiences. Key topics will cover:

• Gaslift optimisation
• ESP application for mature fields
• Water flooding management for high watercut reservoirs
• Gas recycling opportunity/Challenges for oil and gas condensate reservoirs

With more than a decade of digital oil field implementations, the industry began its own digital transformation through the Internet of Things (IoT), big data analytics, and machine learning algorithms to enhance the exploration and production life cycle. This section is devoted to share the applications of digital transformation and machine learning, and to investigate all possible solutions to increase the oil recovery of mature fields. This session will discuss and address the following related topics:

• Application of AI in EOR
• Applications of AI/big data/IoTs to optimise oil and gas production
• History matching with machine learning tools
• Prediction of petrophysical/geomechanical properties using AI techniques
• Prediction of PVT data using AI
• Well log analysis using machine learning techniques
• Well testing interpretation with AI