Russian Mature Fields Redevelopment

Abstract

Abstract Redevelopment of mature oil fields is becoming increasingly important in Russia and worldwide. An extensive application of new ideas, coupling reservoir management and production enhancement of mature oil fields, is outlined in this paper. Discrepancies in the pressures, production and injection data can create significant errors in reservoir simulation models. Uncertainty should be acknowledged and accounted for during the history matching and reservoir simulation process. In many cases large amounts of historical data were collected but much is either inaccurate or critical types of data have not been gathered. Lots of Russian fields have great potential using modern techniques but each project has great uncertainty due to data constraints. A strategic goal for Oil Company is mature fields redevelopment using new technology and approaches, in order to enhance oil production. Brown fields are suffering from serious reservoir management problems and field redevelopment strategies are based on significant improvement of the reservoir management and water flooding, development of new water injection patterns, which means idle producers/injectors recovery and production enhancement work on existing wells. The conclusions and recommendations of the paper include suggestions for ways to solve these problems. An understanding of historical data errors is not enough to guarantee reliable simulation models; reservoir description uncertainties and errors will always be an important driver of the model results.