Abstract
Although the hottest topic today is unlocking unconventional resources, the established heavy oil reservoirs continue to offer a great opportunity for growth given the relative low cost of development. The mature heavy oil reservoirs generate high returns given the existing infrastructure in terms of facilities, pipeline, generators, knowledge of the steam distribution, and the continuing technology advancements in subsurface understanding and modeling
In this study we introduce a novel approach for the successful identification of remaining cold oil steamflood opportunities in a mature field through the use of heat management knowledge, large data utilization, ArcGIS and mapping artificial intelligence technologies. The methodology exploits the log data and existing full-field earth model and automates the screening and ranking of development patterns of a large heavy oil field. The workflow proposed replaces the manual engineering approach which uses hard cut-offs applied on key petro-physical properties to find promising areas for development.
The combination of the knowledge acquired during 30 plus years of operations, integrated with intelligent data driven technologies generate tremendous business value to smart operators who pursue these opportunities and continue to embrace these types of resources.
