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Geomechanics at the Heart* of Reservoir Flow

Competitive advantage in oilfield exploitation today requires prime performance in exploration, in driving down development costs and in improving reservoir recovery.  Reservoir Dynamics Ltd. can help with all three of these, but particularly recovery.

RDL conducts research and provides consultancy and training services on the topics of geomechanics, faults and fractures and their influence on fluid flow in oil and gas reservoirs.

Conventionally, a dynamic model of a reservoir refers to the simulation of fluid flow within a static framework of rock (apart from a pore volume compressibility that is usually assumed to be homogeneous, isotropic and unchanging).  In contrast, plentiful field evidence from worldwide reservoirs indicates that it is not only the fluid that moves during reservoir operations: the rock is also dynamic with small strains which are heterogeneous, anisotropic and focussed on faults, fractures and other discontinuities;  this leads to time-varying properties, including permeability.  This influence has been seen in production data whether or not the reservoir was characterised as "naturally fractured". Recognition of the involvement of additional physics in reservoir behaviour can lead to benefit for practical issues of well numbers and placements, injectivities, productivities, sweep efficiencies, short-term and longer-term forecasting and reservoir simulator history-matching.  The technology is well-suited to mature fields, but lessons can be applied to green fields and exploration. This really does imply more recovery at less cost for relatively small investment in analysis.

*  A note that summarises the implications of this phrase can be downloaded here. The company logo represents not hearts, but the orientational distribution of correlation in x-x strain (x is across the page) in an elastic medium.  Similar lobes have been observed in 2 types of field production data: see Heffer et al, 2010 and Heffer & Lean, 1993 . Heffer, 2012a has proposed a mechanism that links those completely independent sets of observations: it involves the presence of compliant, stress-aligned (micro-)cracks, whose stress fields interfere constructively in shearing directions.  There is plentiful, again completely independent, evidence for the prevalence of such micro-cracks in most formations (see publications (co-)authored by Stuart Crampin,  previously Professor of Seismic Anisotropy at The University of Edinburgh)

TRAINING COURSES:

Tailored internal company courses are available on request: please contact us

For more information contact: info@reservoir-dynamics.co.uk

Reservoir Dynamics Ltd 

Registered in England and Wales No. 3845305 

VAT Registration No. 733 6027 49