NOTES

Reservoir pressure is a necessary parameter for assessing and development of many reservoirs.
Any rate transient analysis, volumetrics, material balance, or simulation work requires it.
However, accurately measuring reservoir pressure is difficult and depends on different factors
like depth, temperature, rock properties etc.

The pressure variation with time recorded in observation wells resulting from changes in rates
in production or injection wells. In commercially viable reservoirs, it usually takes considerable
time for production at one well to measurably affect the pressure at an adjacent well.
Consequently, interference testing has been uncommon because of the cost and the difficulty
in maintaining fixed flow rates over an extended time period. With the increasing number of
permanent gauge installations, interference testing may become more common than in the past.

In petroleum industry, several alternative methods of formation pressure determination are

used, with some of them being able to estimate formation pressure in each layer of a multi-
zone well. One of them is a wireline formation tester that records pressure across each zone of
interest (less than one meter thick) after a small amount of fluid (a few litres) has been
withdrawn from this zone. This can be done by using a probe forced through the mudcake, or
by isolating the zone of interest by dual packers. The wireline formation tester can be run both
in cased and open-hole wells, although the latter option is not widely used, first, due to the
necessity to perforate casing and then isolate the additional perfs, and, second, due to the risk
of channelling in case of a poor cement bond between well and cement or cement and reservoir,
which may result in contamination of the pressure data. Much more often the wireline
formation tester is run in infill wells to understand by how much the pressure has depleted
around these wells. In multi-layer cased wells, non-invasive methods such as well testing and
deconvolution are used far more often. Transient pressure testing provides information about
hydrodynamic parameters of the reservoir by analysing the pressure response to well
production rate/flow rate variations. Hydrodynamic methods in multi-layer wells show
weighted average reservoir characteristics over all hydrodynamically independent reservoir
zones.

Also, pressure transient tests in single wells require shutting in the well. If the permeability is
lower than 50 mD, the shut-in period can be days or weeks long, which would result in a
substantial deferment of oil and gas production. If the client has long-term pressure data
recorded at the bottomhole, reservoir parameters can be determined by applying an advanced
 NOTES
deconvolution method. The principle of deconvolution method consists in creating a synthetic
pressure fall-off curve taking into account all available pressure data recorded over the entire
well operation period, assuming that the well production/flow rate was constant. This approach
in most cases affords the most accurate description of a pressure transient curve in a wide time
interval with all main zones outlined. It can be seen therefore that the main advantage of the
deconvolution method lies in the fact that it permits ascertaining the reservoir boundaries,
which is impossible in those cases when short single-well pressure transient test is run.
Theoretically, a specially developed technique for pressure evaluation in each active reservoir
zone based on multiple-rate PLT data could handle this problem but behind-casing channelling
and leaks in the completion string may significantly distort the data. Another important
consideration is a high sensitivity threshold of the PLT and comparatively high measurement
error. This paper describes a method of formation pressure evaluation in multi-zone wells,
separately for each zone, based on spectral noise logging and temperature logging data. This
method is free of many drawbacks that are typical to the above-mentioned techniques. The
obtained pressure values have been verified using independent methods of transposed Pressure
Transient Analysis and deconvolution.

Because a baffle is a device used for altering the flow pattern in a tank, the use of a baffle wall
was considered to modify an existing potable water service reservoir operating as a storage
tank to achieve better water quality. Therefore, it is of great interest to study the effects of
baffle configurations on the performance of the service reservoir. With the advancement of
computational science and resources, a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) method has
become a reliable alternative to flow and tracer tests. Adopting dynamic meshes, this study
investigates the effects of baffles, located at various locations, on the flow pattern and chlorine
concentration distribution of a potable water service reservoir in Singapore during the refilling
phase. The results of this study show a dual effect of the baffles located at the flow recirculation
region. On one hand, it can break up the vortex to shorten the flow path. On the other hand, the
velocity magnitude of the fluid is reduced after flowing past the baffle, because of the impact
and viscous forces induced by the baffle. These two effects are contradictory to one another in
enhancing the performance of the service reservoir acting as a storage tank, because short flow
path and high velocity magnitude is preferred to achieve better water quality. The overall effect
of baffling is found to be counter-productive in this feasibility study. The results also
demonstrate the importance of studying the effects of baffle configurations under dynamic flow
condition.
 NOTES

The major aim of this work would be to try quantifying the inter-reservoir fluid transmissibility
i.e. the Inter-layer cross flows neglecting the wellbore conditions and all other production
constraints outside the reservoir, and only taking into consideration all the possible geological
and petrophysical factors that could influence flow in the reservoir, using models which were
built using the MBAL simulation program. Actual production and pressure data of a faulted
Multilayered field producing from the Niger Delta region of Nigeria (taking two major
reservoir sands D5.0 &D6.0) are used in the modelling, for which a thorough quality check
was done on the data. Pressure trend analysis, Production performance analysis, PVT
characterization, and Fault seal analysis was done to determine a lot of the conclusions
presented. Attempted also was the determination of the reservoir allocation using the horizontal
permeability and the transmissibility values.