Reservoir Characterization of Low-Permeability Turbidites to Improve Waterflooding in the Long Beach Unit, East Wilmington Field, California

Jenkins, Creties D.¹, Don Michel², David Simmons³, Nitin Srivastava³, Shahin Al-Sharif⁴, Randy Harris⁵, John Weisgram⁶ (1) DeGolyer and MacNaughton, Dallas, TX (2) DeGolyer and MacNaughton, (3) OXY Long Beach Inc, (4) Occidental Oil and Gas Corporation, (5) THUMS Long Beach Company, (6) Bainbridge Petroleum Consulting,

The U-P Ford zone in the Long Beach Unit of the East Wilmington Field consists of low-permeability (2-50 millidarcies) turbidites that have been waterflooded since field start-up. Forty years of successes and failures have provided valuable lessons about how to best produce these sandstones given their thin-bedded nature, lateral and vertical changes in reservoir quality, and formation damage susceptibility. This work has become more challenging with time as thinner bedded, more heterogeneous sandstones have been targeted for their remaining oil. In this talk, we discuss work conducted over the past three years to more closely integrate the geology, 3-D seismic, petrophysics, numerical simulation, and drilling/completion practices to identify bypassed oil and effectively waterflood these sandstones.