Russkoye Heavy Oil Field: Complexity and Exploration Prospects

Abstract

Russkoye field is a unique field containing strategic volumes of hydrocarbon reserves. The pilot projects that lasted more than 20 years show its complexity and ambiguity: high viscosity oil, unconsolidated reservoir, thick gas cap, bottom water, location in the Arctic environment determine the objectives of the seismic, geophysics, development, production and exploitation studies. This paper announces the key uncertainties that exist in the field and were taken into account to form the current vision of the project solutions for its development: determine principal production profiles, count and mutual location of production and injection wells, consider lateral heterogeneity through an adaptive development system, meeting the critical operating conditions.