Improved Water Injection Index Curve on Estimation of Oil in Place for Fractured Vuggy Carbonate Reservoirs

Abstract

Fractured vuggy carbonate reservoirs play an important role in the world crude oil resources. The significant reservoir heterogeneity represented by complex distribution of multi-scale fractures and vugs brings challenges to reservoir oil in place (OIP) estimation, which is a fundamental parameter in oil field development. OIP estimation based on production dynamic analysis is regularly carried out in oilfield practice, the result of which is normally adopted as a comparison to volumetric calculation from geological study for mutual verification. This paper introduces a widely used water injection index curve method on OIP estimation of fractured vuggy carbonate reservoir in Tarim oilfield, which is a straight forward plot of bottom-hole pressure versus cumulative water injection. An improved model taking into consideration the compressibility of second gas gap is presented and applied on real well from Tahe carbonate reservoir. The application of the new model demonstrated that conventional method tends to over-estimate the OIP, while the improved model gives a relatively reliable estimation. The improved water injection index curve in this paper is easy to be conducted based on well production and injection dynamic and shows advantages on convenient pressure conversion from well-head to well-bottom and avoiding dealing with the high uncertainty of aquifers in carbonate reservoir.