The Impact of Carbonate Reservoir Heterogeneities on Hydrocarbon Flow & Recovery: Lessons Learned from Central Luconia

The Central Luconia fields have been delivering gas for about 30 years and petroleum engineers have been collecting large amounts of static and dynamic data by exploring, appraising and producing the Miocene carbonate build-ups hosting the gas. This is presently used to optimize existing field recovery, develop new fields without production data and reduce geohazards for drilling operations. It further provides an excellent data set to understand the role of reservoir heterogeneities and hydrocarbon properties on production behavior and recovery, which can be extrapolated to similar fields with less data.

Based on this rich data set, reservoir heterogeneities with large impact on production & recovery are found to be: faults & fractures, karst, argillaceous flooding layers and facies. These heterogeneities and their relative position with respect to the GWC control the water ingress during production and hence the recovery mechanism.

Field examples of these behaviors based on production data, 3D and 4D seismic surveys will be shown and conclusions drawn for fields similar settings. The results can be utilized to predict the behavior of green fields with similar properties in order to decide on development strategies, optimize well count, type and placement, as well as completion designs.