Integrated reservoir management for the long term - the Carpinteria Offshore Field

摘要

The Carpinteria Offshore Field, Santa Barbara, California, has produced more than 100 million barrels of oil to date. This mature field has continued operations in an economically and politically challenging environment that finally resulted in the abandonment of the field's California State leases by the lease holder. The abandoned leases, together with adjoining federal leases are now operated by an independent producer. Los Alamos National Laboratory has joined with that independent operator, Pacific Operators Offshore, and with the State Lands Commission of California and the Minerals Management Service, in a unique collaborative effort to redevelop the mature field. This project is a part of a larger umbrella project, the Advanced Reservoir Management Project (ARM), that is designed to demonstrate the worth of advanced computational tools and state of the art methods for independent oil and gas producers. The Carpinteria Reservoir Redevelopment project takes a long-term view of reservoir management - as a result, our management plan includes a continuing investment in time and technology in order to better understand the reservoir. In particular, we have completed an extensive reservoir characterization and geological modeling effort that has created a self-consistent model, satisfying geophysical, geological, and engineering data constraints. We have begun the engineering-intensive flow simulation phase of the project using the current geological description of the reservoir, and are confident that our careful efforts in geological modeling will result in a reasonable reservoir flow model. Dynamic documents exist that are used by participants to stay abreast of developments on the project.