Quantification of Reservoir Connectivity for Reservoir Description Applications

Abstract

Summary: This study investigates means for efficiently estimating reservoir performance characteristics of heterogeneous reservoir descriptions with reservoir connectivity parameters. We use simulated primary and waterflood performance for two-dimensional (2D) vertical, two- and three-phase, black oil reservoir systems to identify and quantify spatial characteristics that control well performance. The reservoir connectivity parameters were found to correlate strongly with secondary recovery efficiency and drainable hydrocarbon pore volume. We developed methods for estimating primary recovery and water breakthrough time for a waterflood. We can achieve this estimation with three to five orders of magnitude less computational time than required for comparable flow simulations.