Heavy Oil Reservoir Management - Latest Technologies and Workflows

Abstract

Abstract Successful heavy oil reservoir management practices, are built on analyzing and accurately predicting the reservoir behavior over time. To enable these practices, the critical component that assures their success is a thorough understanding of reservoir physics. Given the complex nature of heavy oil reservoirs including geomechanical properties, fluid flow behavior, etc., there is a need to develop a repeatable technique that can account for these complexities within an acceptable margin of accuracy. The objective of this study is to conduct a comprehensive review of all the latest technologies and workflows developed for heavy oil reservoir management, so that, it can be used as a single source of reference for the industry. The latest technologies for heavy oil reservoir management, their underlying principles, along with the advantages and limitations for each of the methods in real-world applications, have been reviewed from different parts of the globe. Based on this review, conclusions have been drawn that help select the best criteria for using the latest heavy oil reservoir management techniques. The primary component of successfully applying heavy oil reservoir management methods, lies in accurately representing the reservoir physics. These components include petrophysical properties, fluid flow and geological properties of a given formation. In addition to outlining each of these components, an emphasis has been given to highlight the important criteria that enable the successful application of these methods to a given area. As such, the study will be an information repository catered to assist in developing robust reservoir management workflows for heavy oil reservoirs. While there are other reference, with examples, on heavy oil reservoir management; the uniqueness of this study lies in summarizing key lessons learned from real-field applications of these methods. Within a single source or reference, this study has given the specific focus on summarizing various aspects that are important to successful heavy oil reservoir management processes.