Development of an enhanced oil recovery screening system
Pamela Widjanarko A and Akim Kabir ACurtin University of Technology
The APPEA Journal 50(1) 549-558 https://doi.org/10.1071/AJ09032
Published: 2010
Abstract
Selecting a suitable enhanced oil recovery (EOR) process for a given reservoir is a challenge for reservoir engineers because he or she has to compare pros and cons of all the available EOR methods in the context of each selected reservoir. The task becomes even more complex if they have to go through the details of hundreds of mature and depleted reservoirs to come up with a shortlist of EOR candidates for more detailed investigation. Conducting such a screening study could be daunting unless it is approached in a systematic manner.
In this paper we describe development of an EOR screening system, which will enable engineers and scientists to sieve through some commonly available reservoir parameters for dozens or hundreds of reservoirs at a time, in a relatively efficient manner without compromising the quality of the outcome. Prior to the development of the screening system, an extensive literature review was conducted to develop the main EOR database and to narrow down the few essential criteria that would be sufficient for judging a reservoir’s candidacy for one or more known EOR techniques. Multilayer feed forward neural network and classification tree methods have been selected for the proposed screening system using the data mining software called XLMiner. The developed EOR screening system was tested by conducting some sensitivity analysis and screening tests. The results generated by the proposed EOR screening system were found satisfactory.
Pamela Iryanti Widjanarko is a junior field engineer at Schlumberger Geophysics Nusantara, Indonesia, specialising in artificial lift segment. She holds BEng in chemical engineering from Widya Mandala Catholic University, Surabaya, Indonesia (2006), as well as MPetEng and MPhil in petroleum engineering from Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Australia (2009). Her research interests include enhanced oil recovery and production reservoir engineering. pamela_iw@yahoo.com |
Akim Kabir is a senior lecturer at the Department of Petroleum Engineering at Curtin University of Technology, Perth, where he teaches in the areas of production, completion and reservoir engineering. He worked in the oil and gas industry for about 17 years before joining the academia in 2004. His research interests include near wellbore reservoir and inflow performance modelling of various completion types, completion optimisation, reservoir and production system integrated simulation, water shutoff, production optimisation and enhanced oil recovery. He has previously worked with CSIRO Australia and ESSO Australia Ltd as a simulation scientist and reservoir engineer respectively. Prior to joining Curtin in 2004 he worked for Petronas Carigali, Malaysia as a staff production reservoir engineer, where he was involved in various aspects of reservoir and production engineering. He has authored several technical papers in various fields of petroleum engineering. He has served in the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) in various capacities ranging from program chair, section chair, to Applied Technology Workshop (ATW) chair. Akim holds a BSc degree in chemical engineering, a MSc in petroleum engineering from Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana (1986) and a PhD in petroleum engineering from Curtin University (2009). Member: SPE and Engineers Australia. Akim.Kabir@bg-group.com |
