To understand the role that science and technology play in the improved recovery of oil and hydrocarbon fields generally, it is necessary to know of several milestones in the evolution of the reservoir management itself. This evolution is instructive in that it helps us understand some of the most important efforts that have been made by the oil and gas companies to improve oil field recovery ever since the success of the first oil well drilled in Pennsylvania in 1856.
Oil was familiar to mankind very long before that well was drilled. In various parts of the Middle East, a semisolid oozy substance called bitumen seeped to the surface through cracks and fissures, and such seepages had been tapped far back into antiquity – in Mesopotamia, back to 3000 B.C. (the most famous source was at Hit, on the Euphrates, not far from Babylon and the site of modern Baghdad.). In 19th century America, however, it all came down to market forces and costs. If petroleum could be found in sufficient abundance, it could be sold cheaply, capturing the illuminating oils market from products that were either far more expensive or far less satisfactory. Yet, a business could not be built from skimming oil stains off the surface of creeks or from wringing out oil-soaked rugs.
Drilling was developed more than fifteen hundred years earlier in China, with wells going down as deep as three thousand feet to reach for salt. Around 1830, the Chinese method was imported to Europe and copied. But it was only when a group of scientists and investors from New York realized the huge benefits of producing oil profitably that this technique was applied to recover oil from deep under the surface of the Earth (the first well was only sixty-nine feet deep). It marked the beginning of a new era in the recovery of a substance whose profitable development had eluded humanity for so long.
Over ensuing decades, the growing demand for oil drove the development of new techniques for oil recovery. Oil price rises in the mid last century facilitated the common use of secondary and enhanced oil recovery techniques. A modern phase of horizontal well drilling that was starting in the US and Europe kicked off a growing use of a variety of nonconventional drilling techniques to boost field production.
All these advances were constantly being underpinned by a continuous development of geological concepts. The use of facies models in the characterization of modern depositional systems coupled with the continuing development of new wire-line logging tools and reservoir geophysics was becoming routine in reservoir management. Integration of seismic, wire-line logs and outcrop data formed the foundation for developing the high-resolution sequence stratigraphy concept in the 1980s and methods for determining structural controls on fluid compartmentalization in the 1990s.
Today, reservoir management is becoming increasingly more complex as the world’s oil fields deplete. To cope with this, multidisciplinary teams have become more integrated and are combining sophisticated technologies with modern concepts in reservoir characterization and modelling. Increase in computer power, a vastly improved resolution of 3-D seismic data, and routine acquisition of 4-D seismic surveys for evaluating sweep efficiency in reservoirs and for planning infill well campaigns are contributing in the continuing development of advanced data integration techniques to locate the remaining oil in mature fields.
