Society of Petroleum Engineers

Distinguished Lecturer 2016-17 Lecture Season

Improving Reservoir Simulation Modeling with

Seismic Attributes

Isabela Falk

Schlumberger

Abstract:

Seismic attributes are being used more and more often in the reservoir characterization and interpretation processes. The new software and computer’s development allows today to generate a large number of surface and volume attributes. They proved to be very useful for the facies and reservoir properties distribution in the geological models, helping to improve their quality in the areas between the wells and areas without wells.

The seismic attributes can help to better understand the stratigraphic and structural features, the sedimentation processes, lithology variations, etc. By improving the static geological models, the dynamic models are also improved, helping to better understand the reservoirs’ behavior during exploitation.

As a result, the estimation of the recoverable hydrocarbon volumes becomes more reliable and the development strategies will become more successful.

Biography:

Isabela Falk is a Senior Geologist, currently the Subsurface Team Leader in a Schlumberger P&AM project in Romania. Previously she worked as a Project Geoscientist for Fugro-Jason in Germany and Holland. Prior to that, she worked as a Researcher Geologist in the Romanian National Gas Company: Romgaz.

Isabela holds a PhD in Geology from the University Babes-Bolyai from Cluj-Napoca, Romania, since 2008. She has 20 years of experience in the Oil& Gas industry, specialized mostly in geological modeling, but is experienced also in seismic inversion.

She made several scientific presentations in internal and international conferences and is a member of SPE, SEG and EAGE.

Society of Petroleum Engineers

Distinguished Lecturer 2016-17 Lecture Season

“Fooled by Randomness”

- Improving Decision Making With Limited Data

James Gouveia

Rose & Associates LLP

Abstract:

Professionals routinely face the challenge of making informed decisions with limited data sets. Our exploitation of Unconventional resource plays has exacerbated this issue. We commonly refer to these resource plays as “statistical plays”, as large programs have provided repeatable year over year results. Competitive pressures and the desire to get to the right answer as soon as possible has driven the observed decision-making based on limited data sets. In an environment where horizontal well costs can exceed $10 MM and programs hundreds of millions of dollars, decisions based on limited wells have become our industry’s “money pits”. Development decisions are often made without due consideration for the representativeness of the data. Similarly, we frequently test new technologies with limited samples with the expectation that a simple arithmetic comparison of the average results can validate or refute their further application.

This talk presents the theory and utilization of aggregation curves as a pragmatic graphical approach to determining the uncertainty in the sampled mean relative to the desired average program outcome. The presentation will conclude with a discussion on the use of sequential aggregation plots as a graphical approach to validating the representativeness of our forecasted results versus based on limited actual results.

Biography:

James Gouveia is a Professional Engineer with a diverse technical, business and operations background. He has worked in a variety of technical and managerial assignments in exploration, reservoir engineering, strategic and business process planning, portfolio and risk management. From 1996 to 1999, Mr. Gouveia was Director of Risk Management for the Amoco Energy Group of North America. In this role he was accountable for assurance of consistent project evaluation of major capital projects. With BP, he was an Assurance champion and Asset manager. Jim has co-authored and presented papers, most recently as a contributing author to the SPEE’s 2011 Monograph 3, and SPE 175527 & 175888 & 121525. Mr. Gouveia is a member of APEGA, SPE, SPEE and AAPG. Mr. Gouveia is a partner in Rose & Associates LLP.

Society of Petroleum Engineers

Distinguished Lecturer 2016-17 Lecture Season

Does Heavy Oil Recovery Need Steam?

Johan van Dorp

Shell

Abstract:

Heavy Oil recovery traditionally starts with depletion drive and (natural) waterdrive with very low recoveries as a result. As EOR technique, steam injection has been matured since the 1950s using CSS (cyclic steam stimulation), steam drive or steam flooding, and SAGD (steam assisted gravity drainage). The high energy cost of heating up the oil bearing formation to steam temperature and the associated high CO2 footprint make steam based technology less attractive today and many companies in the industry have been actively trying to find alternatives or improvements. As a result there are now many more energy efficient recovery technologies that can unlock heavy oil resources compared with only a decade ago. This presentation will discuss breakthrough alternatives to steam based recovery as well as incremental improvement options to steam injection techniques. The key message is the importance to consider these techniques because steam injection is costly and has a high CO2 footprint.

Biography:

Johan van Dorp holds an MSc in Experimental Physics from Utrecht University and joined Shell in 1981. He has served on several international assignments, mainly in petroleum and reservoir engineering roles. He recently led the extra heavy-oil research team at the Shell Technology Centre in Calgary, focusing on improved in-situ heavy-oil recovery technologies. Currently, he is senior consultant in the "Nederlandse Aardolie Maatschappij", a JV operated by Shell. Van Dorp is also Shell Group Principal Technical Expert in Thermal EOR and has been involved with most thermal projects in Shell throughout the world, including California, Oman, the Netherlands, and Canada. He (co-)authored 13 SPE papers on diverse subjects.