) Best Practices For The Simulation Of Niger Delta Fields

The importance of reducing the cost per barrel of produced oil and obtaining high recover factors has led the industry to invest heavily in reservoir simulation as a tool for understanding managing fluid flow in the reservoir. While a reservoir simulator is able to solve even the most challenging problems, it relies on consistent and good quality input data in order to produce reliable output and meaningful forecasts (garbage in, garbageout). With the great number of shallow reservoirs in the Niger Delta, drilling costs are not very high and risks are low. As the reservoirs become more and more mature, proper reservoir management is required to continue profitable production of these fields. Using some typical Niger Delta onshore fields, this paper will demonstrate how to avoid pitfalls in setting up simulation models, highlight important quality control procedures and also illustrate how to obtain some of the missing data. The paper will also show how the relative importance of the different data items can be assessed, so the reservoir engineer can find out quickly which data has a great influence on the result, and which data has little influence. Recommendations will be given for the modeling of stacked reservoirs, for quality controlling PVT-data and computing missing SCAL data, and for the handling of production data. New technologies such as sensitivity analysis of uncertain reservoir data, the use of 3D visualization for QC and the application of advanced simulation features will be reviewed as well