A multi-scale approach to improve reservoir characterization and forecasting: the Albacora Field (deep-water offshore Brazil) study

Abstract

The Upper Albian Namorado Sandstone is one of the reservoirs of the Albacora Field, located in the Campos Basin, deep-water offshore Brazil. It is a sand-rich turbidite system where the most important controls on permeability are calcite cementation, thin beds of non-reservoir lithologies and some north-south trending faults. A major multidisciplinary reservoir characterization project was conducted to improve the reservoir description using all available data. In this paper, we focus on how the effect of rock heterogeneities were represented in the fluid flow model and on the performance obtained from this model. The basic idea was to define a hierarchical model of facies established on the basis of three main work scales: porous systems (thin sections and core sample scale); composite facies (whole core and log scale); and seismic facies (interwell to field scale). An up-scaling technique, based on the geopseudo concept, was used to generate the effective petrophysical properties for the fluid-flow simulation model. A Markov-Bayes geostatistical simulation method was applied in facies stochastic modelling. The sophisticated model that was built allowed very fast history matching. Fig. 11. Field production and water-cut adjustment.

Hierarchical geocellular facies modelling of a turbidite reservoir analogue from the Eocene of the Ainsa basin, NE Spain

“…17 shows porosity and water saturations after 0.34 pore volumes injected (PVI) for selected cross-sections of the models. (Slatt and Weimer, 1999;Slatt, 2000;Stephen et al, 2001;Cunha et al, 2001;Larue, 2004;Larue and Friedmann, 2005). 8.…”

“…Significant effort has been focused upon understanding their architecture and internal sandstone body geometries in order to facilitate reservoirscale facies modelling (see recent examples in Wonham et al, 2000;Cunha et al, 2001;Purvis et al, 2002;Smith and Moller, 2003;Conybeare et al, 2004;Satur et al, 2005). Sedimentological heterogeneities that affect hydrocarbon production can occur at a scale that is both sub-seismic (Slatt and Weimer, 1999;Coleman and Sheppard, 2000;de Araujo Simoes-Filho and Queiroz de Castro, 2001) and less than the typical development well spacing (Hurst et al, 1999).…”

Insight into Heterogeneous Calcite Cementation of Turbidite Channel-Fills from UAV Photogrammetry

“…In conclusion, it is suggested that the discrete nature of concretions makes an object-based approach [66] the best suited technique for stochastically modelling heterogeneous calcite cementation, in which insertion of objects with different shapes and size can be conditioned to statistics from outcrop analogues similar to CdV.…”