Improving recovery from mature oil fields in the West Texas Permian Basin

Abstract

We undertake reservoir characterization, reservoir simulation, and data ana-lytics to investigate various pathways for improving oil production from mature oil fields. This study focuses on the oil fields located in the West Texas Permian Basin. We provide guidelines for optimizing waterflood and CO2-Enhanced Oil Recovery (CO2-EOR), maximizing the benefits of well stimulation, and determining the best development strategies for Residual Oil Zone (ROZ). We offer several improvements to the numerical solution of Capacitance Re-sistance Models to facilitate their application to large-scale mature oil fields. We put forward an evidence-based analysis to show that good wells make better stimulation candidates and evaluate the applicability of this idea in improving well intervention candidate selection. We review and evaluate the origin and resource potential of ROZs in the Permian Basin and assess the effect of various design variables and res-ervoir properties on the performance of CO2-EOR and storage in ROZs. Mature oil fields amount to more than 70% of current worldwide oil produc-tion and play a prominent role in energy supply. Using our proposed approach which combines both proactive and reactive mature fields solutions, the operators can miti-gate the problem of declining oil production from three different angles depending on the characteristics of the reservoir, the investment budget, and the required im-plementation timeline.