What Is Reservoir Management?
Reservoir management is a practical science that uses elements of geology and petroleum engineering to predict the behavior of oil and natural gas within subsurface rock formations.
What Are the Benefits?
Reservoir management is used throughout the full life cycle of crude oil and natural gas reservoirs. It is used to determine the most cost-effective way to manage the development of a new field or to bring new life to an older field with, for example, enhanced oil recovery measures such as steamflooding, or steam injection. Through the use of a suite of technologies, including remote sensors and simulation modeling, reservoir management can improve production rates and increase the total amount of oil and gas that is ultimately recovered from a field.
What Chevron Is Doing
Chevron has applied reservoir management techniques for more than six decades. These multidisciplinary techniques enable us to obtain the greatest recovery and value from the whole reservoir, rather than from wells or smaller reservoir regions.
To increase the productivity of an existing field, we frequently use enhanced recovery techniques. These include gas injection, which we first applied at the Kettleman Hill Field in California in 1942; waterflooding, which Texaco began utilizing in 1953 at the Salem, Illinois, field; and steamflooding. Steamflooding was first used in the mid-1960s to optimize recovery from mature heavy-oil fields in the San Joaquin Valley in southern California.
The successful San Joaquin Valley venture provided important lessons for when the company later embarked on the world's largest steamflooding venture at the Duri Field in Indonesia's Sumatra Province in the mid-1980s. The Duri steamflood project, which involved drilling more than 5,000 wells, covers more than 18,000 acres, about the size of Manhattan. The operation more than tripled Duri's daily oil production, enabling the field to surpass the 2 billion-barrel mark of total oil production in 2006.
We've also developed a modeling technology that increases our ability to forecast the effectiveness of using enhanced heavy-oil recovery techniques to increase the productivity and life of a reservoir. The technology incorporates a tool that changes to fit the geology and history of a given reservoir.
Reservoir management technology also may be applied before a field begins production. An example is the deepwater Benguela Belize–Lobito Tomboco project in Angola, where we employed integrated reservoir management techniques to design a field development plan that would increase production and reserves. We're also applying real-time advanced reservoir management practices to increase oil production from the field as actual production data becomes available. One key to achieving these production gains is having a framework of standardized reservoir management practices that can be consistently applied by our teams around the world.
Computer Fantasy Meets Reality
Chevron's ability to see inside oil and gas reservoirs is gaining new clarity through the development of Intersect, a reservoir simulation tool. It uses parallel computing, dividing large problems into smaller pieces and solving them simultaneously. In addition, Intersect uses unstructured gridding, depicting reservoirs like 3-D jigsaw puzzles with hundreds of thousands of curvy cells.
Intersect already is being tested in the sour gas–rich Tengiz reservoir in Kazakhstan. Located 3 miles (4.8 km) underground, the Tengiz reservoir is formidable: vast, hot, high-pressure.
By imaging the Tengiz Field's boundaries and geologic characteristics with computers, Chevron was able to strategically drill new wells to increase production. The Intersect tool enhances this effort with its ability to produce hundreds of detailed development scenarios for the field in a short amount of time.
Updated: March 2009