Abstract
Prior to any EOR application, quantifying the remaining oil saturation (ROS) after water flood is critical in order to establish the target oil for a potential EOR scheme. The most widely available datasets for quantifying ROS are from the saturation logs such as resistivity logs from infill wells and pulsed neutron capture (PNC) logs from cased wells. However, the interpretation of these logs generally requires prior knowledge of water salinity. In most water flood projects, the injected water is different from the formation water, and the salinity is unknown in the water flooded zones. Logging tools for saturations without prior knowledge of salinity, such as the C/O log, also have limitations.
The current practice to overcome this problem is to apply one or more of the following techniques:
• Log-injection-log
• Chemical tracer
• Sponge coring, pressurized coring, etc.
However, these techniques are relatively expensive and time-consuming. They cannot be used routinely field wide as a reservoir surveillance tool.
In this paper, we present a methodology to reduce the uncertainties in saturation logs within the context of reservoir model history-matching. In addition to matching pressure and water cut, the new methodology seeks to match the produced water chemistry too (with formation water and injection water chemistry as inputs). This is due to the recent advance of reservoir simulations that can model reservoir water composition changes by considering geochemical reactions of injection waters, formation brine, and reservoir minerals. With this new simulation capability, resistivity and sigma values per grid block are computed as part of the simulation, thus pseudo-logs of total resistivity and neutron capture cross section (S) can be generated as part of the simulation. This enables direct history-matching of the measured log signals.
For an EOR project, the implication of this new simulation methodology is to encourage the frequent sampling and analysis of injection and produced water as part of the reservoir surveillance, and run resistivity and/or S logs to monitor saturation changes even when injection water is significantly different from formation water.
