Online Journal for E&P Geoscientists

Warrlich, Georg ^*1; Kharusi, Ahmed ¹; Mamari, Talal ¹; Kindy, Zaher ¹; Goossens, Peter ¹; Garimella, Sai ¹; Harris, Jeremy ¹; Ramli, Adnan ¹
(1) PDO, Muscat, Oman.

PDO’s northern oil directorate produces very successfully from thin Shuaiba transition zone fields utilizing horizontal well technologies and waterflooding. These fields are in varying stages of maturity varying from brownfields with 30+yrs of production history to greenfields with only 1 to 2 penetrations. Key to successful developments is the application of learnings from the more mature fields to the less developed reservoirs for characterization, development management, facilities and operations. This enables cost-efficient appraisal and development of the fields, improved production forecasting and optimization of operations and acquisition of surveillance data.

In the subsurface a regionally consistent correlation framework for all fields, similar reservoir modeling techniques and tailored dynamic and static data acquisition are applied. Open-hole logs acquired from the horizontal wells are integrated with regional geological understanding and core data to predict reservoir heterogeneities affecting sweep efficiency and drilling hazards. Desaturation measurements increase the understanding of the production behaviour of the fields and the sweep efficiency of the well patterns. This enables better production forecasting and optimized field development wrt. well spacing, facilities capacities and appraisal requirements.

This paper will show examples how these methodologies and workflows are applied and shares good practices & learnings applicable to other settings.