ITF Technology Street
Innovation & technology developments in the global gas, oil and energy industry.
University of Leeds
IPEGG - Integrated Petroleum Engineering - Geomechanics - Geophysics
Next Generation technology for the petroleum industry
With support and funding secured from four ITF member companies, researchers with a broad expertise (including geology, geophysics, geomechanics, petroleum engineering) from the University of Leeds, Bristol University and Rockfield Software Ltd collaborated and embarked on a multidisciplinary study to assess how geophysical indicators of stress and mechanical property distributions within reservoirs can be integrated with coupled geomechanical- fluid flow models to predict reservoir behaviour (i.e. stress changes, compaction, fault reactivation) during production.
Geomechanics is emerging as an important area for the oil and gas industry due to the need to extract petroleum from challenging environments, which include deep and ultra-deep water environments, high temperature-high pressure reservoirs, structurally complex fields and drilling through depleted reservoirs to extract bypassed reserves. Many reservoirs experience significant compaction during petroleum extraction, which can lead to problems such as sea floor subsidence, well bore failure, reduced reservoir permeability and can also have a significant impact on 4D seismic signals.
An advanced modelling tool was developed, which will eventually be used by non-specialists, both to improve the accuracy of day-to-day tasks, such as predicting the feasibility of 4D seismic surveys, and to address problems that have so far proven difficult for the industry, such as predicting fault stability during production.
By having better integration between the petroleum engineering, geology, geophysics, and geomechanics disciplines, a better understanding of how to achieve maximum value from reservoirs will be gained. The aim of IPEGG was to create software which can couple Rockfield’s finite element-based geomechanical modelling software, ELFEN, to industry-standard production simulation models and then use the output to estimate a range of seismic attributes.
Software was created to couple ELFEN to the various production simulation models and by undertaking extensive background research, many knowledge gaps were filled which previously existed between the various disciplines. The results of the project saw ELFEN successfully coupled to a full field production simulation model.
The results of this study will be applied to a range of issues including prediction of the effect of production on fault reactivation; optimising mud weights and wellbore trajectories; enhancing production simulation modelling in stress sensitive reservoirs; estimating whether and when to undertake 4D seismic surveys and estimating the optimal timing for the drilling of undepleted reservoirs. Since the completion of IPEGG, the researchers have used the software for individual consultancy projects and are now adapting the workflows so that they can be used to enhance production from unconventional gas reservoirs (shales and tight sandstones).
