Low-permeability black oil reservoirs (“light-tight oil” or LTO) are currently a significant focus of development in North America. High profile examples include developments of certain areas of the Eagle Ford, Bakken and Wolfcamp formations in the U.S., and the Bakken and Cardium formations in Canada. Commercial development of these plays has been enabled by the use of multi-fractured horizontal wells (MFHWs), however quantitative evaluation of well-performance remains a challenge.
Important tasks of reservoir engineers working these plays include 1) characterizing reservoir and hydraulic fracture properties and 2) generating a forecast for producing wells. Although there a number of methods that can be used to achieve these purposes, rate-transient analysis (RTA) remains one of the most popular. However, until now, RTA has relied upon simple analytical approaches that do not honor the complex physics of flow in LTO reservoirs.
The intent of this webinar is to discuss recent advances in RTA that have made possible the analysis of LTO reservoirs that exhibit complex reservoir and fluid behavior including 1) multi-phase flow and 2) stress-dependent permeability, amongst others. Field examples from the U.S. and Canada will be used to demonstrate the practical applicability of these techniques for analysis of early-time (flowback) and long-term (online) production data, and numerical simulation will be used to validate them. Model inversion (for reservoir and hydraulic fracture properties) and forward modeling (forecasting) methods will be demonstrated.
This webinar will be of practical interest to those reservoir engineers involved in the analysis of light-tight oil wells.
