Integrated Reservoir Management: a Powerful Method to Add Value to Companies' Assets. a Modern View of the Eor Techniques

Abstract

Integrated reservoir management is an attractive process to add value to the oil companies' assets. Indeed, increasing the reserves of their reservoirs already in production through an improved development strategy constitutes for the oil companies a real opportunity and an economic alternative to costly and risky exploration surveys. Integrated reservoir management is basically a way of combining complementary approaches and techniques such as reservoir characterization, use of complex well architecture, special core analysis design of recovery processes, reservoir monitoring and reservoir simulation, and creating a positive synergy between them. Thanks to the advances that have been observed in the domain of the computer science, reservoir management means also real time management. Thus, the large amount of data acquired can be while producing a reservoir used to develop the knowledge of the reservoir, update the reservoir model, reduce the underlying uncertainties, design the most suitable production architecture, ensure the productivity and the injectivity of the wells, target bypassed zones, select the most appropriate recovery process, and hence, increase the overall recovery. Most of the ingredients of such a strategy are already available. What still needs to be developed is a productive way of linking those ingredients together to build an integrated system. Such a system, when made available will constitute a major toolkit in the toolbox of the production engineers. In this paper, we review and illustrate the different ingredients that have to be included in such an integrated system.