Seismic Determination of Reservoir Heterogeneity: Application to the Characterization of Heavy Oil Reservoirs

Abstract

The objective of the project was to examine how seismic and geologic data can be used to improve characterization of small-scale heterogeneity and their parameterization in reservoir models. The study focused on West Coalinga Field in California.The project initially attempted to build reservoir models based on different geologic and geophysical data independently using different tools, then to compare the results, and ultimately to integrate them all. Throughout the project, however, we learned that this strategy was impractical because the different data and model are complementary instead of competitive. For the complex Coalinga field, we found that a thorough understanding of the reservoir evolution through geologic times provides the necessary framework which ultimately allows integration of the different data and techniques.3