The role of reservoir engineers 1

How does the reservoir engineer avoid this potential hazard? Well, the onus is on
engineers to get the fluid production and injection profiles correclt in the first place,
in the initial development study. But, as pointed out in section 1.24 the input data to
such studies is of low quality because it is collected under static conditions whereas
to assess the efficiency of a waterflood requires its viewing under dynamic conditioins.
Therefore, evaluating offshore fields is difficult but far from impossible. What
seems to give rise to most of the errors has nothing to do with the sophistication of
the computer model used but instead relates to failure to observe, understand and
take full account of all the data so expensively acquired during the appraisal drilling
programme. An attempt is made throughout Chapter 5, on waterdrive, to explain
how best to view these data so ias to reduce the likelihood of serioils error.
'The situation demands very close linkage, throughout the lifetime of an offshore
field, between the reservoir and project engineers. There must necessarily be a
two way flow of information because, as explained in Chapter 5, section 5.3, there
are two basic equations involved. One is the reservoir material balance dictating
its performance and the second is a platform facilities balance and unless these
can be married into one, there may be a danger of some failure occurring. It
follows that reservoir engineers involved in offshore developments cannot afford the
luxury of confining their thouglhts merely to what happens underground: everything
ceases at the wellbore. Insteaid, they must broaden their perspective to consider
everything in the well, at the surface and even the availability of facilities that
might be shared with neighbouring platforms, since all these factors may affect
the way in which the field is developed. If, for instance, there is no possibility of
disposing of large volumes of ]produced gas, which is often the case offshore, then
the reservoir pressure must no1 be allowed to fall bellow the bubble point leading to

the production of excessive and largely unpredictable volumes of gas. This constraint
would imply that the reservoir pressure must be maintained by either water or gas
injection. If it is anticipated that in the latter years of a waterdrive project there will
be insufficient gas production to provide gaslift for high watercut wells, then plans
must be laid to raise the reservoir pressure to a level at which .wells can produce
by natural flow or, if this is not an option, make-up gas from elsewhere must be
imported to the platform to defer field abandonment.