Paper: Reservoir Characterization And History Matching Of A Delaware Slope-Basin Reservoir

The Delaware formations are submarine channel/fan sands that are difficult to characterize. In this study, new methods have been applied to characterize the East Livingston Ridge Delaware Field. Using well logs, a complex 3-D reservoir model, composed of six layers and a meandering channel, was constructed to represent this geological depositional setup. Due to drastic changes in layer lithologies, determining multiple oil/water contacts and water saturations required a detailed well log interpretation. Using core data and well logs, good correlations between log porosity and core porosity have been obtained. Using the obtained porosity at the wells, geostatistics was applied to estimate the areal porosity distribution in each layer. The permeability distribution was derived by using a k-4 correlation obtained from the core data. Since the large-scale 3-D reservoir model: obtained with core data and correlations, does not match the production history, an automatic history matching code was used to estimate large-scale properties. Production rates of the three phases (oil, gas and water) at each of the 23 wells of this study and the reservoir pressure were history matched using a recently developed automatic history matching algorithm. A detailed reservoir description, including the large-scale k-4 correlations, pseudo relative permeability, and other reservoir engineering parameters were estimated in each layer. The conditioned reservoir model was used to investigate several drilling and/or waterflood schemes for future development of the reservoir.