Closed-Loop Reservoir Management for Thermal Recovery Processes
Date
2015-10-05
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Abstract
The combination of model-based optimization and simulation into a single workflow forms the main components of a powerful tool called Closed-Loop Reservoir Management (CLRM). Real-time reservoir management has been applied mostly for water flood application and there is lack of information on application of CLRM for a thermal recovery process.
In this research, a novel methodology has been developed to value surveillance prior to acquisition for a Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage (SAGD) process. The workflow evaluates the values of a rate, pressure and temperature surveillance represented by their measurements in injectors, producers and observation wells in a SAGD project. A 2D SAGD reservoir has been used to test the validity of the developed methodologies. The results rejected the null hypothesis proposed and show that these three types of surveillance are uncorrelated, and in the test have reduced the uncertainty range of the future reservoir outcomes by 84%.
The power and utility of the developed approach have been expanded to generate a second workflow. The testing workflow represents a new application of the CLRM on thermal cases to test the type of surveillance, the number and locations of the required observation wells and the period of history matching in a 3D SAGD reservoir with the intent of discarding models that would satisfy history at the production well and would be poor predictors. The workflow tests how would the future reservoir outcomes that are controlled by observation wells capture the growth of a steam chamber during the SAGD process.
A third comprehensive workflow has been developed to combine an Ensemble Kalman Filter (EnKF) algorithm and simulation with a thermal option to data assimilates of a 2D SAGD reservoir permeability. It is proposed to use the updated reservoir permeability as an input for the reservoir simulation runs from initial time to eliminate any inconsistency between the updated reservoir permeability and the dynamic reservoir properties. The frequency of the updating has been investigated and the outcomes show that incorporating more production data at the first year of production has reduced the uncertainty range of future cumulative oil production in the range of 50-70%.
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Engineering--Petroleum
Citation
Shaker, W. (2015). Closed-Loop Reservoir Management for Thermal Recovery Processes (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/25335