Sour gas injection (SGI) in the non-fracture platform area of the giant carbonate oil field, Tengiz, began in 2007. SGI project was proven to successfully maintain reservoir pressure in the platform area, add significant reserves, reduce sulfur production, and enable additional oil processing capacity at the crude processing facility. Despite the confirmed benefits, the gas breakthrough and increasing gas-oil ratio (GOR) trends in several SGI producers became a concern as the injection project matured. The preferential production from wells with lower GOR allowed higher total oil throughput, but also introduced production constrain on SGI wells with higher GOR. As the result, SGI producers were historically choked back or completely shut-in as soon as the gas breakthrough was confirmed and the producing GOR began to increase above 500m3/m3.
The reservoir heterogeneity with the sour gas injection overprint created complex dynamic environment at the subsurface. Special surveillance program was designed to improve understanding of gas front movement through the reservoir, assess vertical and areal sweep efficiency and remaining oil in place in various zones of interest. Surveillance program design had to overcome several operational constrains, such as wellbore accessibility issues from the scale build, gas handling limits of the surface facilities, and complex simultaneous operations near the active high-pressure sour gas compressor. Moreover, the log interpretation had to consider crossflow and stimulation chemicals impact on the logging measurements. Finally, the integration of logging interpretation results with reservoir model was required to improve the reservoir model forecast and boost the value of acquired information.
This paper describes the results of the conducted surveillance campaign, the novel calibration methodology of gas saturation profile from the time-lapse cased hole measurements with proxy from the multi-component simulation model output and the early results of the performed gas shut-off operations. The described methodology allowed direct calibration of the model outputs with the gas saturation results from pulse neutron logs and provided more accurate sweep efficiency and oil recovery forecast across the entire SGI area. Calibrated model revealed consistent gas breakthrough profile and significant volume of low GOR oil remaining in the wells with gas breakthrough.
The updated reservoir model was then used to evaluate various development scenarios of SGI area. Gas shut-off scenario showed particularly encouraging low GOR production trends and improved oil recovery especially from the lower intervals. After the economic analysis, several wells, including long-term shut-ins, were added to the workover queue to timely realize production benefits. Early production results after gas shut-off workover consistently met or exceeded model forecasts. Described methodology provided more accurate scope definition, value assessment and justification for the SGI optimization project and could be applicable to other improved oil recovery projects.
