Productivity and oil fingerprinting: Application of analytical chemistry in the assessment of reservoir quality

Julie Nielsen, Kristoffer G. Poulsen, Jan H. Christensen, Charlotte Lassen, Theis I. Sølling*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

2 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

The ability to understand and possibly even predict the productivity of wells across a field is an important accomplishment in a production setting. In the tight Lower Cretaceous chalk field Valdemar, 5 wells have been observed to produce significantly larger oil volumes compared to nearby wells. This study was conducted to map the inter-well differences in the oil composition to better understand the productivity differences. This was done by analyzing any chemical differences of 21 samples from 16 different wells by GC-MS and principal component analysis of summed extracted ion chromatograms (SICs) using the chemometric analysis of selected ion chromatograms (CHEMSIC) method. The sterane (m/z 217 and m/z 218) and C4 (m/z 234) biomarker SICs were found to have chemically meaningful features described by principal component 1 (PC1). The association between these markers and the relative production was modeled to provide a better understanding of the productivity of the different wells. A correlation between oil saturation and productivity was established in the sense that the more mature and thus less viscous oil seem to have charged certain favorably placed reservoir sections first; these locations coincide with the location of the 5 wells in question.

Original languageEnglish
Article number107914
JournalJournal of Petroleum Science and Engineering
Volume195
Number of pages7
ISSN0920-4105
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Dec 2020

Keywords

  • CHEM-SIC
  • GC-MS
  • Oil fingerprinting
  • PCA
  • Reservoir quality

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