Presentation summary and key findings

¶ … 1955 edition of Oil and Gas Journal, Reservoir Engineering is the "art of developing and producing oil and gas fluids in such a manner as to obtain a high economic recovery." However, in 1955 the world was very different in terms of sustainability, pollution, globalism, and most certainly, energy usage.

Essentially, the branch is concerned with using as much science as possible (geology, applied math, physics and chemistry) to figure out how to produce as much crude oil and natural gas from the environment. Of particular interest to this field, particularly in the 21st century, is producing accurate records and forecasts for use in reporting to regulatory bodies and production and mining companies. This is most important because globalization has increased the world's need for fuel, thus making it important to model reservoirs, forecast production and wells, and do economic modeling of financially viable resources.

Key points of Reservoir Engineering:

Determining Oil Volume -- through seismic testing, rock properties, water in area

Issues of Oil in Place vs. Recoverable Oil -- must be cost-effective to get oil out using current technology

Optimization of recovery vs. investment -- depends on soil type and what is necessary to do to extract usable product

Predicting recovery over time -- interesting to note, different mathematical techniques yield divergent answers

We see that one of the key issues surrounding reservoir engineering is how to improve prediction of viable source materials over time. One format suggests that it is necessary to divide the reservoir into as many smaller volumes as possible, with each having a unique solution; then, using porosity/permeability, pressure, and water saturation try to predict recovery over time. We can use Darcy's Law to do this because it describes the flow of a fluid through a porous medium (rock): Darcy's law is a simple proportional relationship between the instantaneous discharge rate through a porous medium, the viscosity of the fluid and the pressure drop over a given distance.

Once the viability of recoverable of the material is justified, there are several ways to increase the recovery yield:

Injecting water or gas into strata to recover additional oil -- use CO2, natural gas or nitrogen which displaces oil and makes it more permeable

Chemical injection -- usually alkaline or polymers