Abstract: The Future of Petroleum Reservoir Management

DALTABAN, T. SEZGIN

Three quarters of recent increases in World oil reserves have been attributed to 'better reservoir management' rather than to new discoveries. Past practice has been to manage petroleum exploitation on a Departmental basis, with Exploration assessing and ranking prospects, Reservoir Engineering assessing development plans and Production Facilities implementing plans. Any revisions necessary might involve restarting a project evaluation from scratch. Current practice is to manage operations through Asset Management Teams involving all disciplines. It is hoped that this approach will not only eliminate fruitless directions of effort, but that the quality of work in each discipline will benefit from the interaction. That is, the result of a team effort is greater than the sum of the individual efforts.

To date, this is most apparent with the interaction between geology, reservoir geophysics and reservoir engineering through reservoir characterization. This is the current area of greatest effort, with improved geophysical technology and computer power leading to more and more detailed and complex simulation models.

The future development of reservoir management must lie in the critical evaluation of the relative value of activities. The value of multiple 3D, 4D seismic surveys, well to well seismic or multi-layer three phase well test interpretation is no longer being questioned. Both in the areas of reservoir data acquisition and of assessing opportunities in the period of production decline, it is likely that expert systems will need to be developed with the associated base of experience, understanding and knowledge.

Finally, the reduction of costs, the maintenance of low, but viable rates of production and the imminent threat of abandonment costs will increase reserves, insignificant in relation to past production, but valuable at the time.

The new independent states formed after the disintegration of the USSR now organize their own oil industry and some of them, particularly Russia, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan have the prospects of a significant role in the world oil market in a near future. Overwhelming majority of the initiatives in rehabilitating the older fields and the development of new oilfields in these countries are carried out in cooperation with Western oil companies. It is believed that this new era of cooperation and access into new ventures will have universal impact on the current and future reservoir management practices.

AAPG Search and Discovery Article #90942©1997 AAPG International Conference and Exhibition, Vienna, Austria