--> Turning Tar to Gold: Observations from Venezuela’s Orinoco Extra Heavy Oil Belt, by Michael Waite; #90062 (2007)

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Turning Tar to Gold: Observations from Venezuela’s Orinoco Extra Heavy Oil Belt

Michael Waite
Chevron

The Hamaca Field, located in Venezuela's Orinoco Heavy Oil Belt, is a giant extra-heavy oil accumulation that is being developed by Petrolera Ameriven, an operating agent owned by PDVSA, ConocoPhillips and Chevron. The concession area contains 8-10 API gravity oil trapped in shallow fluvial-deltaic reservoirs of Miocene age. Over the 35-year life of the project, the drilling of more than 1000 cold-production horizontal wells are planned in order to deliver approximately 190,000 BOPD to a heavy-oil upgrader facility in Venezuela, where the oil is converted to 26 API syncrude and shipped to market.

Hamaca is the fourth in a series of large-scale integrated extra-heavy crude production and upgrading projects being developed in the Orinoco Heavy Oil Belt. An extensive front-end engineering and facility design effort was used to optimize project performance. The field, in its sixth year of production, is being developed successfully through the use of the latest technological developments and application of the best practices from other heavy oil projects.

This presentation will focus on several key lessons-learned that may be extended to deep-water heavy oil development. These include the importance of an integrated crude commercialization plan. It is not just about getting the oil to the surface; then we need to move it, upgrade it, and market it, after we have improved margins to offset the higher facilities capital investment. The presentation will review the importance of early and intense reservoir characterization to drive facility design and improve economics. The economics of heavy oil narrows the margin for error in reservoir characterization - and probably even more so in the deepwater cost environment. Additionally, the presentation will share the view that development of a non-conventional resource such as Hamaca requires non-conventional thinking to understand what is important to maximizing recovery, and will stress the criticality of early uncertainty management planning to help direct and focus reservoir characterization effort where it will add value most.

AAPG Search and Discovery Article #90062©2006 AAPG Hedberg Research Conference, Veracruz, Mexico