[Editors] MIT: Improving oil extraction with new mapping technology

[Elizabeth Thomson]

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A better way to pinpoint underground oil reserves
--MIT mapping technology could make extraction more efficient
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For Immediate Release
WEDNESDAY, JAN. 14, 2009

Contact: Elizabeth A. Thomson, MIT News Office
E: thomson at mit.edu, T: 617-258-5402

Photo and Graphic Available

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Picture this: an accurate map of a large underground  
oil reservoir that can guide engineers’ efforts to coax the oil from  
the vast rocky subsurface into wells where it can be pumped out for  
storage or transport.

Researchers in MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering  
have developed technology that can generate such a map, which has the  
potential to significantly increase the amount of oil extracted from  
reservoirs.

The new technology uses the digital image compression technique of  
JPEG to create realistic-looking, comprehensive maps of underground  
oil reservoirs using measurements from scattered oil wells. These maps  
would be the first to provide enough detail about an oil reservoir to  
guide oil recovery in the field in real time.

“Our simulation studies indicate that this innovative approach has the  
potential to improve current reservoir characterization techniques and  
to provide better predictions of oil-reservoir production. The hope is  
that better predictions ultimately lead to more efficient operations  
and increased oil production,” said Behnam Jafarpour, a recent MIT  
graduate who is now an assistant professor in petroleum engineering at  
Texas A&M University.

Jafarpour and Dennis McLaughlin, the H.M. King Bhumibol Professor of  
Water Resource Management at MIT, published a pair of papers  
describing the technique that will appear in an upcoming issue of the  
Society of Petroleum Engineering Journal, as well as a third paper  
that appeared in the June 2008 issue of Computational Geosciences.

The spatial structure in geologic formations makes it possible to  
compress rock property maps. But JPEG compresses the many pixels in a  
detailed image down to a few essential pieces of information that  
require only a small amount of storage. In the oil reservoir  
characterization application developed by MIT researchers, a similar  
mechanism is used to provide concise descriptions of reservoir rock  
properties. The new technique uses oil flow rates and pressure data  
from oilfield wells to create a realistic image of the subsurface  
reservoir.

Petroleum extraction is expensive and relatively inefficient —  
sometimes as little as one-third of the oil in a reservoir is actually  
recovered through pumping. So engineers rely on enhanced recovery  
techniques such as water flooding to mobilize the oil. To guide this  
work, they make real-time predictions of subsurface variables,  
including oil saturation and pressure, but they’re essentially working  
blindly. The rock properties needed to make these predictions (for  
instance fluid conductivity of rock at a particular depth) can’t be  
seen or measured.
Instead, engineers infer geologic properties indirectly from seismic  
data and measurements taken at scattered wells.

“In a typical reservoir, millions of pixels are needed to adequately  
describe the complex subsurface pathways that convey the oil to wells.  
Unfortunately, the number of seismic and well observations available  
for estimating these pixel values is typically very limited. The  
methods we’ve developed extract more information from those limited  
measurements to provide better descriptions of subsurface pathways and  
the oil moving through them,” said McLaughlin, lead researcher on the  
project.

In a 36-month simulated oil-recovery process, McLaughlin and  
Jarfarpour’s estimation approach accurately captured the main features  
and trends in fluid conductivity of a reservoir formation,  
demonstrating that the new technique is robust, accurate and efficient.

“Our next step — already in progress — is to test our idea in real oil  
reservoirs and evaluate its impact on oil recovery under realistic  
field settings,” Jafarpour said.

This research was funded by the Shell International Petroleum Co.

--END--

Written by Denise Brehm, MIT Civil and Environmental Engineering



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