Estimating Reservoir Connectivity & Permeability During Early Reservoir Life by Percolation Theory and Case Study

Reservoir connectivity and effective permeability evaluation is of great importance in reservoir forecast that is used for decision making on various possible development scenarios. During the early stage of life of a field when data are scares, these parameters are usually based on analogues or rules of thumb and not detailed reservoir modeling. Therefore, there is a great incentive to produce much simpler physically-based methodologies to predict reservoir connectivity and effective permeability very quickly especially for engineering purposes.This can be addressed by using percolation approach. In this paper we used percolation approach in fast estimation of reservoir connectivity and effective permeability during early lift of reservoir. To validate the approach, we have used Burgan reservoir dataset of Norouz offshore oil field in south of IRAN. We have shown that the reservoir connectivity and effective permeability predictions from percolation approach gives reliable results once compared with exact numerically obtained results from modeling of real field data. Moreover the first approach as obtained from algebraic manipulation is very fast whereas the latter is so costly and time consuming.