Fast Method Finds Infill Drilling Potentials in Mature-Tight Reservoirs

Abstract

Abstract Infill drilling has been identified to play an important role in improving oil or gas recovery in the tight hydrocarbon fields. But quantifying the infill drilling potentials in producing tight hydrocarbon fields is often a challenging problem, due to large variability in rock quality, well spacing, well completion practices, and the large number of wells involved. At the same time, with the increasing demand for energy and favorable oil and gas prices, more and more fields all over the world are undergoing infill drilling. It is not uncommon for a company to have hundreds or thousands of infill candidates to choose from. Complete integrated reservoir studies to determine infill potential are often very time-consuming and costly for many tight hydrocarbon fields. This paper presents an alternative approach to conduct detailed reservoir studies to find infill drilling potentials in tight hydrocarbon basins. This method can quickly evaluate the infill drilling potentials within weeks even with thousands of wells. Several field examples are provided to demonstrate the application of the method in mature-tight gas basins and the primary advantages of the technique are its speed and reliance upon well location and production data only.