Exploiting deep water fields
....it's not as easy as explorers think!
Thursday, September 19, 2013
London
The Geological Society
In previous events we have focussed on exploring for deep water fields, especially those with deep water clastic reservoirs – how significant are they to recent global discovery history, which provinces have been especially successful, which regions are seeing the most activity?
Exploitation of these fields once discovered is a further issue, and actually one where data, knowledge and insights are much harder to come by.
Experience tells us that it is vital to properly understand their relatively complex geology in three-dimensions, to be able to predict how fluids – whether hydrocarbons or water - might move around the field, to be able to monitor how fluids are in fact moving around the field, to be able to make reliable predictions of recovery factors under various development scenarios, including IOR and EOR, and so on.
Why for example does the average recovery factor for Gulf of Mexico deep water reservoirs sit around 40% whilst first BP and more recently Apache been able to take the recovery factor for the Forties Field in the North Sea beyond 60%?
In this Forum we will focus on:
- how to better understand deep water clastic reservoirs, and make predictions as to their likely response to being placed on production,
- how to monitor the actual movement of fluids around the field and its component reservoirs,
- which technologies can be applied to move recovery factors from the ‘boringly normal’ ~40% to truly exploiting the asset by moving towards the ‘technical limit’ recovery factor?
We look forward to being offered some interesting presentations!