Forecast of oil reserves and production in Daqing oilfield of China

Abstract

As China’ largest oilfield, Daqing is of great importance to China, this paper analyzes the status of the Daqing oilfield and forecasts its ultimate recoverable reserves by use of the URR model. The forecast results are presented for three scenarios which show that the ultimate recoverable reserves in Daqing oilfield are 3574.0 million tons in the optimistic scenario, 3169.3 million in the base case scenario and 3033.3 million in the pessimistic scenario, respectively. A system dynamics model is established and the quantitative relationships between variables in the model are determined. Total oil production, remaining recoverable reserves, annual newly discovered reserves, and the degree of reserves recovery before 2060 are simulated under the three scenarios by use of the system dynamics model. The forecast results show that the future oil production in Daqing oilfield will continue declining, under the base case scenario, from 41.6 million tons in 2007 to 8.0 million tons in 2060. For Chinese policy-makers, it is worth paying attention to the problem of whether oil production in new oilfields can effectively make up for the decline in production of the large, old oilfields.