Experimental Analysis of Displacement Characteristics and Production Potential for Marginal Resources in Highly Developed Reservoirs

Date
2020-11-17
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Abstract
Waterflooding has become a common method for improving oil recovery in conventional oil reservoirs all over the world. Indeed, because most of the earlier exploited oilfields with large reserves have entered a development stage where high water cuts are present, new replacement resources are crucial so that conventional oilfield development will continue to meet increasing worldwide energy demands. The term – a marginal resource refers to those layers that have resource identification but cannot meet the criteria to be considered true reserves under the U.S Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) standards. In this research, the properties and displacement characteristic are experimentally investigated and huge amounts of data, which was provided by CNPC, is analyzed to show the feasibility of economic production of marginal resources. First, a property data collection was analyzed, which can be used to have basic understanding of marginal resources. 104 cores are selected to finish six experiments to get more understanding about the uniqueness of properties. CT test results provided by CNPC are also analyzed to realize a correlation between clay mineral content and production efficiency. Finally, the feasibility of production is shown by a previous development test result. The test and analysis results show that compared to reserves layers, a marginal resource has abundant clay mineral, whose average is 5.5%, which results in a more water-wet rock and more formation damage during a displacement process. On the other hand, its producible oil amount is less than those from conventional sand reservoirs layers. A combined development plan passing a CNPC economy audit shows that the marginal resource can be economically produced.
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Keywords
Highly developed reservoirs, Marginal resource
Citation
Liu, C. (2020). Experimental Analysis of Displacement Characteristics and Production Potential for Marginal Resources in Highly Developed Reservoirs (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.