Improved Understanding of Vertical Barriers / Baffles by History Match Analysis

Abstract

Abstract Minagish Oolite reservoir is a prolific limestone reservoir in Umm Gudair field underlain by an active aquifer situated in West Kuwait. The field has been on production for over 50 years and has been experiencing rising water production levels in the recent years. Understanding the movement of water in the reservoir is vital for maximizing oil recovery. During the producing life of the reservoir, the vertical movement of water is influenced by presence of flow barriers / baffles in the reservoir and how they are distributed in the vertical as well as areal direction. Understanding the lateral distribution of the flow barriers to fluid movement in the vertical direction has been a challenge throughout the production history of the field. Efforts have been ongoing in the past, to understand the movement of aquifer water in the vertical direction based on analysis of openhole log data, structural configuration, stratigraphy, well performance, production logging (PLT) results etc. These have resulted in developing a respectable level of understanding of the distribution and strength of barriers/baffles and their effectiveness in the field performance. In a recent campaign to reduce the rapidly increasing volume of water produced from Minagish Oolite reservoir, a large number of workovers were carried out based on the current understanding of the vertical barriers / baffles, resulting in bringing down the water-cut level appreciably. The paper analyzes the results obtained from carrying out the numerous workovers for water shut-off in the recent campaign. This analysis has been utilized in an attempt to improve the history match in the dynamic reservoir simulation, especially the water-cut history match. Whereas good match of long water-cut history before the recent water shut-off jobs indicates absence of serious issue of well integrity, transmissibility modifiers in the simulation model were required, in order to improve water-cut history match in the post water shut-off period. Thus, there is vast improvement in the simulation team's understanding of the lateral distribution and strength of barriers / baffles. This has greatly aided in the formulation of more pragmatic plans for future workovers involving water shut-off by squeezing-off or isolating watered out layers. The result is a more robust prediction of production profile from the future field development activities. The paper presents how the integrated approach of the open-hole, cased hole logs data with field performance in the history match process of simulation helps in the improvement of reservoir simulation modeling.