Significant Production Improvement of Ultra-Low Permeability Granitic Reservoirs to Develop Heavy Black Oil, Utilizing Channel Fracturing Technique

Abstract

Egypt has been undergoing a deep transformation in terms of development of low quality reservoirs such as; low permeability, marginal assets, and unconventional resources but with the sufficient drop in the market oil price one of the key challenges was pushing the oil and gas industry towards maximizing the potentiality of those types of reservoirs and optimizing the associated risks along with the costs. Petrobel has been under heavy scrutiny to continue delivering in such challenging environment and one of such challenged asset and successfully conducted a comprehensive study to set the best development strategy to unleash this potential of SIDRI Area is a relatively new settlement with a reasonable hydrocarbon potential according to petrophysical analysis. The target formation of SIDRI wells is a sedimentary rock with granitic facies that consist of a series of tight conglomerates over an oil/water column of more than 900m. The pore system of this rigid and stiff formation consists of a micro natural fractures network with secondary cemented porosity. The production is mainly governed these tiny natural fractures that have a permeability as low as 0.1-0.5 md a development plan was performed to develop the field to overcome its poor characteristics and to increase its productivity applying the innovative channel fracturing technique. The channel fracturing techniques has been the key success for enhanced oil recovery. This paper presents the details of formation characterization and reservoir quality assessment, as well as a detailed discussion about wettability alteration and how adversely complicates the process of determining initial saturation. Also the implementation of the innovative channel fracturing technique including designing, experimental works, and execution of the job and how to develop our field to optimize production rate with minimum cost

AAPG Datapages/Search and Discovery Article #90267 ©2016 AAPG/SPE Africa Energy and Technology Conference, Nairobi City, Kenya, December 5-7, 2016