Comparison of the Reservoir Characteristics and Development Strategy Screening between Venezuela and China Heavy Oil Fields
There are many differences for the heavy oil reservoirs between China and Venezuela. Most of the heavy oil in Venezuela is concentrated in the Orinoco Heavy Oil Belt with giant volume of about 1.2 trillion barrels in place, but in China is dispersed all over the country with small volumes for each field. Heavy oil fields in China have more complicated structures and trapping mechanisms, various reservoir types, intensive heterogeneous reservoir distribution and poor reservoir quality compared with that in Venezuela. The heavy oil property is also different. Heavy oil in Venezuela differs from that in China by their relatively low viscosity, high density (low API gravity), low resin content, high asphaltene content, high sulfur compounds and significant heavy-metal contaminants. Different exploitation technologies have been employed based on the different reservoir characteristics in the two countries. The cold production from horizontal wells and multi- lateral horizontal wells is the only technology applied in all the developed blocks of the Orinoco Belt at present time. This technology is proved successful with relatively low cost and high production rate, although it has the disadvantage of a low recovery factor (8-12％). On the contrary thermal recovery is main development strategy and a series of technologies has been successfully developed and applied in the heavy oil reservoirs of China. Cyclic steam stimulation (CSS) is the most successful technology applied in large industrial scale, from which about 86％ of the total heavy oil production is gained. In addition, the hot production alternation techniques in steam flooding have reached the industrial application stage, and a very exciting result also has been achieved from SAGD pilot in Liaohe. This paper gives a detailed comparison and analysis of the reservoir characteristics and existing exploitation technologies for the heavy oil reservoirs in the two countries. The commonly applied cold production from horizontal wells technology in Venezuela could be used for some heavy oil reservoirs in China. On the other hand, multiple development strategies can be selected for the development of the heavy oil in Venezuela, including the method of cold production from horizontal wells subsequently followed by the CSS and steam flooding technique in suitable stage, or the method of direct hot production. The existing hot production techniques in China could be applied to achieve higher recovery and better economic benefit for the development of the heavy oil in Venezuela.
L.X. MU W.J. MA G. XU B.J. XU
CNPC International Venezuela Company
国际会议
首届世界重油大会(The Technical Sessions of the First World Heavy Oil Conference)
北京
英文
1085-1097
2006-11-12（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）