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U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

Revitalizing a mature oil play: Strategies for finding and producing unrecovered oil in Frio Fluvial-Deltaic reservoirs of South Texas. Technical progress report, July 1, 1994--September 30, 1994

Technical Report ·
OSTI ID:10194147
Advanced reservoir characterization techniques are being applied to selected reservoirs in the Frio Fluvial-Deltaic Sandstone (Vicksburg Fault Zone) trend of South Texas in order to maximize the economic producibility of resources in this mature oil play. More than half of the reservoirs in this depositionally complex play have already been abandoned, and large volumes of oil may remain unproduced unless advanced characterization techniques are applied to define untapped, incompletely drained, and new pool reservoirs as suitable targets for near-term recovery methods. This project is developing interwell-scale geological facies models and assessing engineering attributes of Frio fluvial-deltaic reservoirs in selected fields in order to characterize reservoir architecture, flow unit boundaries, and the controls that these characteristics exert on the location and volume of unrecovered mobile and residual oil. The results of these studies will lead directly to the identification of specific opportunities to exploit these heterogeneous reservoirs for incremental recovery by recompletion and strategic infill drilling. Project objectives are divided into three major phases. Phase I, reservoir selection and initial framework characterization, consisted of the initial tasks of screening fields within the play to select representative reservoirs that have a large remaining oil resource and are in danger of premature abandonment and performing initial characterization studies on selected reservoirs to identify the potential in untapped, incompletely drained, and new pool reservoirs. Phase II will involve advanced characterization of selected reservoirs to delineate incremental resource opportunities. The third (III) phase of the project will consist of a series of tasks associated with technology transfer, and the extrapolation of specific results from reservoirs in this study to other heterogeneous fluvial deltaic reservoirs within and beyond the Frio play in South Texas.
Research Organization:
Texas Univ., Austin, TX (United States). Bureau of Economic Geology
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE, Washington, DC (United States)
DOE Contract Number:
FC22-93BC14959
OSTI ID:
10194147
Report Number(s):
DOE/BC/14959--10; ON: DE95002770
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English