San Joaquin Basin

Accurate predictions of connectivity and heterogeneity pose important technical challenges for successful maturation of conventional and unconventional reservoirs. We present the success of a new reservoir management workflow that uses both artificial intelligence and classic models to define the impact of stratigraphic connectivity and heterogeneity on horizontal-well production performance in a mature heavy oil field. The data-driven model based on fuzzy logic was used to compute a new attribute named dynamic Reservoir Quality Index (dRQI). The classical models used the stratigraphic Lorenz Plots, Reservoir Quality Index (RQI) and Flow-Zone indicator (FZI). Workflows were validated through a lookback process on more than 400 wells used to predict the fine-scale stratigraphic and directional heterogeneities within intervals targeted by horizontal wells, and production performance. The workflow was successfully used to optimize the horizontal well placement for 2019-2020 drilling programs.

A horizontal-steam-injection pilot project has been under way for the last 4 years in the Kern River heavy-oil field in the southern San Joaquin Valley of California. This paper presents an investigation into the effect of catalytic nanoparticles on the efficiency of recovery from continuous steam injection. The operator has initiated a cyclic-steam-stimulation project in the Opal A diatomite of the Sisquoc formation on the Careaga lease in the Orcutt oil field in Santa Barbara County, California.

A horizontal-steam-injection pilot project has been under way for the last 4 years in the Kern River heavy-oil field in the southern San Joaquin Valley of California. Researchers at the University of Calgary have developed a solid pellet that can transport bitumen and heavy oil by railcar instead of pipelines. The addition of a hydrocarbon condensate to steam operations in heavy-oil and bitumen reservoirs has emerged as a potential technology to improve not only oil recovery but also energy efficiency.

This page pulls together technology-focused articles from various departments within JPT. This paper introduces a new core-analysis work flow for determining resistivity index (RI), formation factor (FF), and other petrophysical properties directly from an as-received (AR) set of core samples. In this paper, the authors discuss the characterization process for GR tools and how they behave in boreholes different from the one used in the University of Houston (UH) GR characterization pit. This paper discusses a study undertaken to gain better understanding of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) characteristics of volcanic reservoirs with different lithologies. Formation evaluation drew special attention at the 2019 International Petroleum Technology Conference Education Week in Beijing, 24–28 March 2019. The student team that worked on Integrated Formation Evaluation for Resources Exploration and Reservoir Delineation won the first-place award. The first subsea multiphase boosting system was installed in 1994.

Devon Energy and its debt gets smaller, as Canadian Natural Resources adds to its huge, long-term bet on Canadian heavy and ultra-heavy crude. The recent production freefall could accelerate even further as US sanctions-related deadlines pass, the US Energy Information Administration said. The authors of this paper propose a novel work flow for the problem of building intelligent data analytics in heavy-oil fields. This paper presents the data collected by an ultrasound downhole scanner, demonstrating a novel method for diagnosing multilateral wells. Against the background of a low-oil-price environment, a redevelopment project was launched to give a second life to a shallow, depleted, mature offshore Congo oil field with viscous oil (22 °API) in a cost‑effective manner.

Moving their directional drillers into their Houston real-time remote operations centers has improved drilling efficiency for two of the top shale producers. This paper presents a factory-model approach to improving CT drillout performance that has been used successfully for more than 3 years and has become standard practice. The oil industry is currently undergoing a technological transformation that will add value, improve processes, and reduce cost. Future drilling engineers will have knowledge of robotics, automation, and organizational efficiency, which is highly appealing for recruitment. This paper describes challenges faced in a company’s first deepwater asset in Malaysia and the methods used to overcome these issues in the planning stage.

Solar enhanced oil recovery, or solar EOR, is a form of thermal enhanced oil recovery (EOR), a technique applied by oil producers to extract more oil from maturing oil fields. Solar EOR uses CSP to use the sun's energy to heat water and generate steam. The steam is injected into an oil reservoir to reduce the viscosity, or thin, heavy crude thus facilitating its flow to the surface. Thermal recovery processes, also known as steam injection, have traditionally burned natural gas to produce steam. Solar EOR is proving to be a viable alternative to gas-fired steam production for the oil industry.

However, other technologies can often be employed to investigate properties of the earth that correlate better with the properties of interest. If the images from these technologies can be provided at appropriate resolution, and if the knowledge required for interpretation and wise application of these technologies is available within the industry, they should be used. For example, electrical methods are extremely sensitive to variations in saturation, yet surface-based methods provide very poor resolution. Reservoir compaction can be directly observed from surface deformation, and pore-volume or gas-saturation changes can be detected from changes in the gravitational field. Dramatic examples of surface deformation induced by reservoir compaction have been provided by releveling studies (involving repeated high-accuracy surveying) and satellite-based interferometry.

Geological effects can impact the design and successful completion of oil, gas, and geothermal wells. Understanding the stresses and pore pressures within the subsurface are important to development of a geomechanical model that can guide well design as part of an integrated process to minimize cost and maximize safety. The normals to the three orthogonal planes define a Cartesian coordinate system (x1, x2, and x3). The stress tensor has nine components, each of which has an orientation and a magnitude (see Figure 1.a). Three of these components are normal stresses, in which the force is applied perpendicular to the plane (e.g., S11 is the stress component acting normal to a plane perpendicular to the x1-axis); the other six are shear stresses, in which the force is applied along the plane in a particular direction (e.g., S12 is the force acting in the x2-direction along a plane perpendicular to the x1-axis).

While always an implicit goal in steamflood processes, overall process heat management became a topic in the literature in the mid-1980s. The growth of the discipline has closely followed the development of the personal computer and computer applications. Heat management consists of data gathering, data monitoring and adjustments to the process as discussed in this page. Figure 1[1] is a graphical representation of the major components of a heat balance that must be performed to properly manage a steamflood process. Ziegler et al.[2] published a very good summary of a method of implementing the principle.