Offshore

Therefore, even at the venj end of the appraisal stage the reservoir engineer
is confronted with the dilemma of not knowing precisely, or sometimes even
approximately, the degree of pressure coinmunication both areally and vertically
in the reservoirs that have been appraised. Since, for the reasons explained in
Chapter 5, section 5.2, large offshore projects tend to be developed by water or gas
injection and since knowledge of the areal and vertical communication is crucial
in the successful planning of such recovery schemes, the engineer has a problem:
can injection and production wells be located in layers that are contiguous or, in
the extreme, is the reservoir so fragmented by faulting that pressure cannot be
maintained in the system as a whole. To exacerbate matters, all the important
decisions relating to platform design: the number of wells required, capacities of
surface equipment to inject and produce fluids commensurate with the required
oil production profile, must be made up-front and therefore be based on the poor
quality static data. Furthermore, the decisions made at this stage can on occasions
be irrevocable and, of course, in offshore projects it is usually necessary to start
m~~ltiplyinogn shore capital expenditure by orders of magnitude which adds further
spice to the decision making.
Reservoir studies at the end of the appraisal stage are necessarily of a purely
predictive nature, there being no product~on or pressure histoq to match. Under
these circumstances, the only slensible tool to use in making predictions is numerical
simulation modelling because simpler techniques such as material balance tend
to break down (Chapter 3, section 3.5) because the main use of this tool is
in history matching performance. Nevertheless, sound analytical techniques are
presented in Chapters 5 and 6 for predicting the performance of water and gas

drive projects and these should be used in conjunction with simulation modelling
as an aid in understanding the processes. To be candid, however, at the end
of the appraisal stage, irrespective of the technique employed, the quantifica.tion
of predictions of field performance is anybody's guess and is therefore a highly
subjective activity. Simulation models do not necessarily inform on the nature of
the physical forces dictating r~~servopier rformance (as some believe) they merely
reflect the consequences of the input assumptions made by the engineer. Therefore,
assumptions should be kept to an absolute minimum and carefully justified and
every pertinent scrap of reservoir data collected during appraisal drilling must be
thoroughly examined and used in any form of study.