Reservoir pattern surveillance0501 of mature floods using streamlines, by StreamSim Technologies’ Rod Batycky and Marco Thiele is a well laid out, 50 plus page book (along with three SPE Reprints) that proposes streamline simulation as the best way of managing mature, conventional floods of water, polymer, CO2 and more. The thesis is that streamlines are a more manageable and cheaper approach to surveillance and optimizing a flood than the ‘detailed, calibrated reservoir models requiring simulation expertise, that are time consuming to build and maintain and that may be overkill for managing monthly rate targets.’
The book is midway between text book and a user manual for StreamSim’s software. It proposes starting points to improve flood performance with operational recommendations on where to inject more, where less, how much fluid is lost to the aquifer and which patterns perform best.
The authors could perhaps have better argued the case for streamlines vs. the full field simulator. The book takes this as a given and is concerned more with using the technology to enable higher frequency surveillance and intervention. Lightweight modeling approaches are coming into fashion in the trendy world of the digital twin, so perhaps there is another chapter to be written here. RPS was self published on Lulu.com.
This article originally appeared in Oil IT Journal 2018 Issue # 2.
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