Application of Digital Hybrid Tools That Combine Analytics, Machine Learning & Reduced Physics Models to Increase Oil Recovery in Mature Conventional Fields

Disciplines: Data Science and Engineering Analytics | Reservoir

Instructor: Ashwin Venkatraman

Conventional mature fields spread across the world – USA, Russia, Canada, Middle East, North Africa, South America and Southeast Asia, contribute to as much as 70% of all world’s oil. The cheapest and the quickest way to add oil is to increase from existing producing fields. Accordingly, the current challenges to meet world energy needs have increased focus on conventional mature fields. These fields are characterized by the availability of data and hence, lend themselves well to use of new digital tools to identify using unique workflows opportunities to increase oil production.

The democratization of advanced algorithms and the availability of data in conventional mature fields lend themselves well to their adoption of new subsurface workflows. These new workflows aided by digital tools can drastically improve decision making on improving recovery by no CAPEX expenditures (redistributing water/gas/chemicals being injected amongst current wells) or identifying where next to drill the injection or production well.

Digital tools that use these advanced algorithms can be a key differentiator and organizations are already unlocking higher recoveries from existing fields. The availability of data and democratization of these advanced algorithms is changing the landscape of subsurface workflows – helping create as well as improve existing ones. We are in an exciting phase in the industry where access as well as ease of using these advanced tools is transforming decision making in organizations.

In this course, we will start by reviewing new modeling techniques – analytics, machine learning, reduced physics and their applicability in determining relationships. We will showcase how each of these tools and techniques have been successfully applied to field data. Using successful deployment case studies, we show how combination of these tools help create hybrid models that address shortcomings associated with individual approaches We will focus on two specific applications – optimizing injection operations in conventional mature fields (gas injection, water injection or polymer/surfactant injection) as well as opportunities to accelerate field development planning for brownfields as well as greenfields.