Reservoir Monitoring Consortium (RMC) Principal Investigator

Executive Summary The objective of Reservoir Monitoring Consortium (RMC) is to develop new methods for dynamic reservoir monitoring. We will carry out a number of focused applied research projects in reservoir monitoring that are directly pertinent to the current and future needs of our industry sponsors. We will develop specific workflows for different types of reservoirs. This will include the conventional reservoirs (e.g. carbonate, clastic, deep waters) and the unconventional reservoirs (shales, tight sands, heavy oils, and geothermal). This will be preceded by the identification of the key technology gaps with input from the project sponsors. We will then focus on major issues such as integration of disciplines, data, information, and expertise. We will maintain a balance between short and long term, high impact research goals and the immediate and foreseen industry needs. One key distinguishing edge of RMC compared to other academic consortia is its focus on multi—disciplinary aspect of reservoir monitoring. Introduction Optimum reservoir management requires up-to-date information about different reservoir properties throughout the entire reservoir volume. Access to the latest data on fluid distribution in a reservoir, and knowledge of how that distribution is changing with time, allows us to develop cost-effective strategies to get the most out of every field at the lowest possible risk. In the past, the type of data used for reservoir monitoring and production optimization was limited to production data and other well data. This included reservoir pressure and temperature as well as oil water ratio. When significant drop in reservoir pressure or oil production occurred, various enhance oil recovery scheme were implemented. These methods however relied primarily on the production data which provided little information on the three dimensional distribution of the fluids inside the reservoir, making it difficult to devise the optimum strategy for the injection and production wells.