CO2 Enhanced Oil Recovery and CO2 Sequestration Potential of the Mississippian Chester Incised Valley Reservoir System, Haskell and Seward Counties, Kansas

Martin Dubois, John Youle, Dennis Hedke, Eugene Williams, P. J. Senior, and Ray Sorenson

Pleasant Prairie South, Eubank, and Shuck incised valley fill sandstone reservoirs are part of a DOE-funded CO2 enhanced oil recovery (EOR) feasibility study administered by the Kansas Geological Survey. Four operators contributed core and data to the study. The three elongate fields along a 40-mile north-south trend are mature waterfloods, have produced 18.2 MMBO and 8.4 BCF gas to date, and will yield an ultimate recovery of >20 MMBO, about half by primary and half by secondary waterfloods. Preliminary 3D modeling and flow simulations help validate their potential for CO2 EOR. Chesterian-aged sandstone reservoirs were deposited in estuarine to fluvial environments in a narrow, steep-walled valley incised into Meramecian-aged carbonate. The continuous incised valley defined by 3D seismic is up to 200 ft in depth, but is as narrow as 800 ft and averages 1200-1500 feet in width. Thick, porous and permeable stacked sandstone reservoirs, regularly exceeding 100 ft in thickness in aggregate, were deposited as Chesterian seas on-lapped the exposed Meramecian surface. Each field was subject of a multi-discipline study: reservoir characterization, 3D modeling, and reservoir simulation employing the following workflow: 1) Define lithofacies and petrophysical relationships in core; 2) Extrapolate lithofacies in wells without core by wireline logs; 3) Define flow units and detailed internal geometry (parasequence scale); 4) Define valley geometry with 3D seismic; 5) Build 3D cellular geomodel utilizing seismic and well data, populating the model with lithofacies, porosity, and water saturation; 6) Upscale and extract the model for flow simulation; 7) History match primary and secondary production with black oil simulation; and 8) Project CO2 EOR and sequestration outcome for a simple CO2 injection scenario in a fully compositional simulation. 

AAPG Search and Discovery Article #90176©AAPG Mid-Continent Meeting, Wichita, Kansas, October 12-15, 2013