Is There a Better Way to Determine the Viscosity in Waxy Crudes?

Ludwig, John T.¹; Daungkaew, Saifon²; Fujisawa, Go²; Zuo, Julian²; Houtzager, Fred³; Platt, Chris³; Last, Nick³
¹Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand.
²Schlumberger, Bangkok, Thailand.
³Pearl Energy, Bangkok, Thailand.

Accurate viscosity measurement is difficult even under the best of conditions and the lengthy time required to send and receive results from a lab prohibit basing important decisions on the viscosity of the reservoir fluid. Those challenges increase for reservoirs with complex fluids such as the highly viscous, waxy crudes found in many oil fields in South East Asia.

While correlations have been developed to determine the viscosity of waxy crudes, the accuracy can be limited under certain conditions. The objective of the paper is to review viscosity correlations for waxy crudes and examine their applications to the actual field data. Limitations on the use and accuracy of these correlations will then be discussed. This paper also discusses the viscosity obtained in real-time from the suite of Downhole Fluid Analysis (DFA) measurements, and the results are then compared to standard PVT analysis over a wide range of viscosities, temperatures, and pressures.

Results of the DFA viscosity measurements in several fields in South East Asia are discussed together with other fluid properties such as GOR, density, and fluid composition. The viscosity is then examined at the field scale to help understand the reservoir complexity in terms of compartmentalization in these waxy oil environments.

The technical contribution from this paper is that it presents the variation of the viscosity in waxy oil reservoirs and its impact on real time decision making, especially for purposes of pressure transient analysis. This paper covers the evolution of the DFA viscosity measurement including a description of the hardware, discusses the limitation of the DFA measurement for certain conditions, and summarizes the accuracy of the DFA viscosity measurement for different fluids and the ongoing development for covering more fluids in the lower end of the viscosity spectrum.

AAPG Search and Discovery Article #90155©2012 AAPG International Conference & Exhibition, Singapore, 16-19 September 2012