The Successful Development Strategies of Tigh Oil Reservoir: Achievements versus Future Directions

Abstract

Abstract The Oligocene reservoir of White Tiger field is a tight oil reservoir with high heterogeneity and complex geological characteristics. In such complex reservoirs, a detailed geological understanding of the reservoir along with a reservoir simulation is needed to gain a detailed reservoir description and determine the optimal recovery method for this oil reservoir. These are essential in order to have successful operations as well as reducing uncertainties and improving the efficiency of oil field management. With a large database collected from initial production stages of over 50 wells, the authors developed an integrated static and dynamic workflow to forecast oil production under several production scenarios. The challenges of development strategies in such tight oil reservoirs are analyzed and compared with those one in the typical sedimentary reservoir as well as naturally fractured basement reservoirs. In addition, the authors proposed a successful assisted assisted history matching by global optimization to construct a reliable model for complex reservoirs. Finally, this paper provides a comparative evaluation of enhanced oil recovery feasibility by surfactant polymer flooding in tight oil reservoirs. A series of laboratory test and compositional reservoir simulation were performed and analyzed by both experiments and commercial simulator. The results prove that cumulative oil recovery by surfactant polymer flooding increases more than 1.44 times in comparison with water flooding. This is a solid evidence for a promising successfulness of surfactant polymer flooding in complex reservoirs.