Department of Energy specialists at Bartlesville, Okla., have begun evaluating 31 proposals submitted by oil producers, universities, and others in DOE's cost shared round of projects involving U.S. slope and basin clastic reservoirs.
Selections are to be announced in September. Copies of complete public abstracts submitted by the proposers are available from the communications office of DOE's Office of Fossil Energy in Washington, D.C.
Synopses of the Class III mid-term projects were previously reported (OGJ, July 25, p. 108).
Following are capsules derived by OGJ from the public abstracts of the near term proposals:
NEAR TERM PROPOSALS
Near term proposals involve mostly projects lasting 2-3 years and some that would take 5 years.
CALIFORNIA OFFSHORE
Participants in the Carpinteria field project off Santa Barbara are Pacific Operators Offshore Inc., Carpinteria, Calif.; University of Southern California, Los Angeles; and units of Schlumberger, Halliburton, Baker Oil Tools Inc., and Coombs & Associates.
A combination of lateral water influx and commingling of wet and oil sands in existing completions has resulted in unacceptably high water cuts from several wells. The Lower Pliocene Repetto formation consists of thin to massive deepwater sandstones with intercalated siltstones and claystones. Some 30 separate producing layers have been identified.
After establishing a reservoir database, preparing deterministic geologic maps, geologic modeling, and subsurface mapping, the team hopes to drill a geologically targeted trilateral horizontal well from Platform Hogan or Houchin and will consider expanding this development strategy to the entire field.
CALIFORNIA LAND
Four proposals would involve research at Midway-Sunset, Wilmington, and other California fields.
The project proposed by S-Cal Research Corp. and Joyce A. Kostura aims at preventing abandonment of independent operated wells in Midway-Sunset field in California. Increasing oil recovery is the target of a new well configuration and a patented operating process capable of greatly reducing the investment cost required per daily barrel of oil produced.
Phase two calls for using low cost steam additives to improve sweep efficiency of steam injected into the multiple horizontal drainholes drilled and completed in phase one on a typical small lease owned by an independent.
Capital cost savings are expected from the use of a single vertical cased well connected to two independently operated horizontal drainholes sharing the same rod pump.
Well productivity may increase by a factor of three to seven as a combined result of using horizontal drainholes, increasing effective drawdown, and cutting downtime.
University of Utah leads a 57 month project to return to production a Midway-Sunset field Upper Miocene Monarch lease shut-in in 1986 with an estimated 85% of original oil in Place unproduced. The reservoir proved unresponsive to cyclic steaming.
ARCO Western Energy, Bakersfield, and the Utah Geological Survey will participate in the project on ARCO's Pru Fee property near Taft in the San Joaquin basin.
Electric logs for wells in and adjacent to Pru Fee will be calibrated with new cores and formation microscanner logs. Two new wells will be drilled, and calibrated geophysical logs will be correlated on geological workstations to build a detailed, full 3D geologic model for the demonstration site.
Multiple reservoir simulations will address four producibility problems: shallow dip of bedding, reservoir heterogeneity, thin pay zone, and presence of bottom water.
Phase two involves drilling 11 producers, four steam injectors, and three observation wells to create four 2 acre inverted nine spots.
City of Long Beach would team with Tidelands Oil Production Co., Long Beach, Calif., Stanford University, Stanford, Calif., and Magnetic Pulse Inc., Houston.
This 5 year project in inefficiently waterflooded Wilmington field Blocks IV and V will use advanced reservoir characterization tools, including the MPI pulsed acoustic cased hole log, EarthVision 3D modeling software, and OGCI Production Analyst.
Aims are to identify high residual oil saturation sands through casing and establish production from them by recompleting producing and injection wells using selective perforation with gravel packed inner liners and short radius and ultrashort radius lateral completions kicked off from existing cased holes,
Allied Oil & Tool Co. proposes to test whether its patented power jet formation opening technology is capable of mitigating producibility problems such as low reservoir energy, injectivity loss, and sand production.
The technique generally creates a vertical continuity in the reservoir and to the well by opening a 2.5 in. wide "slot" in the formation, penetrating horizontally on an axis through opposite sides of casing to a depth of about 40 in. on each side of the wellbore, Allied said.
The technique involves special tools and systems that use principles common to abrasive jet perforating or drilling operations. High pressure fluids loaded with abrasive elements are pumped through the tooling which allows for cutting of the opening through the formation.
Vertical formation opening will connect to the well discontinuous lenticular sand bodies, fractures, and faults, low permeability zones, and thinly interbedded layered zones and mitigate other diagenetic effects, greatly enhancing gravity drainage, Allied said.
UTAH PROJECT
Target of the Lomax-In-land project is the lowest: portion of the lacustrine Green River formation, the productive Lower Douglas Creek stratigraphic interval, in Duchesne field of the Uinta basin.
New reservoir geologic information coupled with existing data will be used to build accurate depositional models. The program includes reservoir characterization, state of the art multiphase reservoir simulations and advanced formation image logging techniques to identify likely hydrofracture! propagation directions.
The team, which also includes University of Utah Research Institute and the university's chemical and fuels engineering department, plans to transfer the technology to the Uintah and Ouray Indian Tribe's energy department.
WEST TEXAS WORK
Four near term projects would take place in West Texas.
Texas Tech University proposed a 5 year study to predict performance of horizontal and vertical wells in the West Texas' naturally fractured Spraberry trend. The researchers would use laboratory petrophysical, petrographic, and rock mechanics studies, well logs and well test analyses, and 3D seismic.
Laboratory conclusions would be incorporated into a new double porosity, double permeability stochastic reservoir simulator. Results could also be applied to Mississippian-Devonian Bakken shale in the western U.S. and Devonian shale in the Appalachian basin.
University of Texas at Arlington and Merit Energy Co., Dallas, will address multiple thin sand lenses with high variable lateral continuity and separated by thin layers of impermeable shale in Pennsylvanian Canyon sands in North Jameson field, Mitchell County, Tex.
Phase one involves characterization through systematic integration of well log, core, production, and seismic data. Researchers A,ill model depositional environment, use 3D log modeling to map porosity, permeability, and shaliness in three dimensions, and if warranted use 3D seismic modeling to more accurately image reservoir internal architecture..
That data will be used in phase two to identify the best zones in five producing wells and five injectors for workover/recompletion on the V.T. McCabe B lease, Sec. 226, Block IA, H&TC Survey. The third phase involves project evaluation and technology transfer.
University of Houston, Estacado Energy Inc., Lubbock, Tex., and a consulting geologist will combine 3D and 2D seismic data in a 3 year project to image and evaluate high permeability pods of turbidite carbonate sands in northwestern Terry County, Tex.
A well will be drilled on an imaged turbidite pod and a multiazimuth vertical seismic profile will be run to determine limits of the high permeability zone. Seismic data will be integrated with the engineering and geological data to determine whether more wells are needed for optimum production.
Bureau of Economic Geology and Conoco Inc. want to apply numerous reservoir characterization technologies to show that economically significant oil remains in geologically resolvable untapped compartments in Geraldine Ford and W. Ford fields.
The techniques are 3D seismic, subsurface log, core, and petrophysical study, high resolution sequence stratigraphy mapping and petrophysical study of nearby outcrops, petrography, analysis of production history, and geostatistical analysis of interwell heterogeneity.
Geraldine Ford recovery efficiency is an expected 26% from Bell Canyon formation including primary, production, waterflood, and CO2 flooding. W. Ford, still on primary, produces from Cherry Canyon formation.
Reservoir modeling will occur on 1 sq mile in one field, and fieldwide demonstration will follow if warranted.
Copyright 1994 Oil & Gas Journal. All Rights Reserved.
