Abstract: Newly Discovered Field: The Next Steps to Exploitation

Satter, Abdus and Rich Jespersen - Texaco Inc.

The principal goal of reservoir management is to maximize profits by optimizing recovery while minimizing capital investments and operating expenses. The process for economically optimum exploitation of a newly-discovered field (Fig. 1) is discussed in this poster. The action plans, involving teamwork of all functions, management support and field personnel commitment, consist of:

Field Delineation: additional drilling and testing to acquire more reservoir data.

Development Plan:
- recovery scheme-natural depletion alone or augmented by fluid injection,
- well spacing, number of wells, platforms,
- integrated geoscience/engineering reservoir model,
- performance analysis-production and reserve forecasts,
- economic/risk evaluation.

Implementation:
- drilling and completion of wells,
- installation of sub-surface/surface facilities.

Performance Monitoring: data acquisition, including oil, water/gas production, water and gas injection, static and bottom hole pressures, production and injection tests, injection and production profiles and any other data aiding surveillance.

Performance Evaluation: checking the actual reservoir performance against the anticipated behavior to ensure that it is working and it is still the best plan.

Plan Revision: when the reservoir performance does not conform to the management plan or when conditions change.

Abandonment: after full exploitation of the reservoir.

An offshore field example demonstrating all of the above steps is presented to illustrate the application of the reservoir management approach. Predicted results of several potential development scenarios are compared (Fig. 2).

AAPG Search and Discovery Article #90933©1998 ABGP/AAPG International Conference and Exhibition, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil