Tech 101 Series – The Application of Chemical Tracers for Well, Reservoir Surveillance and CCS

Synopsis

The SPE Young Professionals Tech101 series is an event primarily targeted at entry to mid-level engineers within the oil and gas community, to provide “101” level education on topics across the industry.

Professionals of all experience levels are open to come, but keep in mind materials presented are catered to young professionals.

Abstract

Tracer technology offers a powerful means for conducting production and reservoir surveillance, which is both operationally simple to deploy, cost effective and can measure flow properties less than one metre to ten’s of kilometres between wells. Surveillance using tracer solutions truly provide continuous multi-scale monitoring from a well to reservoir scale.  It utilizes flow through porous media and pipe flow in wells as the telemetry method to transport the signals to the sampling point. Therefore, tracer technology is a viable alternative as permanent monitoring technology of choice for well surveillance in today’s field developments, and it is a risk-free solution from both planning and deployment perspectives. In terms of reservoir surveillance, inter well tracers not only provide an understanding of the preferential flow paths between injectors and production wells on a field wide scale, they also provide a method of understanding reservoir connectivity, verifying suspected flow barriers, characterizing flood patterns, estimating residual oil saturations between wells and analyzing the effects of volumetric sweep efficiency.

More recently, interwell tracers have been used to monitor leakage from CO₂ storage reservoirs and used in carbon accounting practices. Inflow tracing is designed to evaluate near wellbore flow performance such as verifying clean up, identifying the location of water/gas breakthrough over time and quantifying flow. The co-implementation of both tracer technologies in the early stage of waterflood or EOR development offers unique ability to monitor wells/reservoir, eliminating the need for expensive and time-consuming wireline interventions and overcome any wellsite logistics challenges.  An increased adoption of integrating inter well and inflow tracer interpretation can reduce uncertainty in history matching well/reservoir models and thus improve reservoir management strategies using assisted history matching tools or optimisers based on results obtained from the tracer signal responses. This presentation will discuss tracer project conceptualization, design, analysis workflow and implementation of combining inflow and interwell tracers.

Speaker – Edmund Leung

Edmund Leung is currently the Senior Technology Advisor with RESMAN, based in Perth, Australia since June 2022. He was previously Vice President for Well Technology leading the RESMAN flow-related interpretation and R&D team, based in Trondheim in Norway. He earned an Honors degree in Petroleum Engineering from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, graduating in 1995.

He began his career as a Schlumberger reservoir engineering consultant, specializing in well testing, reservoir simulation, data mining, intelligent completion optimization, and real-time production surveillance technology for digital field implementations. He has held numerous technical, business development, and management positions in his 15-year career with Schlumberger, with assignments in Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, United States, and United Arab Emirates.

Before joining RESMAN, Edmund was the Global Reservoir Domain Leader in Schlumberger’s Completion and Sand Management Services segment based in Stavanger, Norway, specializing in sand control, flow control modeling, monitoring and R&D. He has authored numerous SPE papers and is an active discussion leader at SPE ATWs related to tracers, sand control and reservoir management themes.

Agenda

Price:             Free

Date:              Tuesday, 26th September 2023

Location:       Santos – 100 St Georges Terrace, Perth WA

Time:

11:30 – 12:00     Registration

12:00 – 12:45     Presentation & Lunch (PROVIDED)

12:45 – 13:00     Q&A

13:00 – 13:30     Networking

13:30                  Session ends