Why It’s Important For Oil Companies To do Reservoir Modeling and Simulation( Part1)
By
RENATUS MAHUYU
Msc Oil and Gas Engineering
Specialized on Reservoir MODELLING AND SIMULATION
China UNIVERSITY OF GEOSCIENCES-WUHAN CHINA.
Phone number /WhatsApp: +8613006172786
Different questions I have been asked by different people about how do oil companies find gas or oil underground?
How do they know if its economical or not?
How much is it there?
For how long will it be produced?
How sure does Oil company have to continue drill in the field?
How do the oil companies reduce risk from guessing where to drill?
How to Forecast oil/gas price?
From the above questions asked, I have decided to write in brief an article to explain some little steps which are taken by different oil companies to do reservoir management and production planning, from exploration stage to production stages.
This article also will give an overview on the basic steps from how oil and gas is discovered during exploration stage to production stages. basically, the aim of the article is to show how modelling and simulation has become an essential tool for most oil company to use as a decision maker, production planning tool as well as monitoring a reservoir during pre-and post-production stages.
It’s clearly known that oil and gas companies invest a lot of funds to obtain oil and/or gas from the ground. this is the most expensive if missing out by drilling a dry well the process will lead to a great loss to the company, roughly drilling a Well it can cost around$7 million (onshore) upto $100 million (offshore), it is definitely a very costly decision., so to minimizethis risk of losing all this money by just guessing,most oil companies decided to start using computerized program for doing modelling and simulation to simplify the process.
Reservoir modeling of a petroleum reservoir is a computer model constructed from different field data such as well head data, seismic data, well logging data, production data and so on the purpose of this model is for improving reserve estimations, decision making, forecast production and all other production improvement plans of the reservoir.
The main purpose for modelling and simulation was to reducing risk taking by guessing process mostly through giving answer on making decision on where to drill a well for production, how much the oil or gas is in the reservoir, how long and how much will be produced and for how long.
Before I explaining more on how modeling and simulationworks, here are some few explanations about who and how to discover the presence of oil and gas underground.
First Oil and Gas Industry activity are divided into three 3 stages
- Upstream sector which deal with searching for potential underground crude oiland natural gas fields to production stage where crude oil and/or raw natural gas brought to the surface.
- Midstream Sectorit involves the transportation (by pipeline, oil tanker, truck,rail)
- Downstream sector commonly it deals with refining to petroleum products such petrol, jet fuel, petrochemicals, diesel oil kerosene, lubricants, natural gas, and liquefied petroleum gas (LPG).
The First stage in any oilfield is exploration/searching stage this work is done byGeologist, where they will follow the following steps
- Prospectinginclude desktop studies; land or seafloor sampling and geophysical surveys – particularly seismic surveys. Exploration wells are not drilled at the prospecting stage.
- ExplorationExploration involves detailed data gathering and modelling including seabed sampling and seismic surveying over smaller, more specific areas. If analysis of data collected from these activities looks promising companies may decide to drill an exploration well
- Drilling an exploration well for conformation of the presence of hydrocarbons (Oil/Gas) in the field.
Further analysis of the well results alongside consideration of market demand and possible oil/gas sales price will ultimately determine if such a discovery is economically viable.
This process aiming to come up with the results whether to continue with exploration to exploitation of oil and gas.
So for those who want to work as geologist in this Oil and Gas field these are some basics of your work
To be continued
Next Discussion will be on Commercially available software which are used with most oil company in the world in construction reservoir model and performing reservoir simulation, how to use and its advantages .
Contact me on for further questions.
Thank you
