Reservoir Characterization Services And Their Significance

By Melissa Collins


Throughout human history, dams have been constructed with the purpose of collecting, storing, and managing the supply of water. It goes without saying that it is an important industrial, even civilizational, endeavor. A lot of logistics actually go into the planning, designing, and building of this artificial basin, which explains the raison detre of Reservoir Characterization Services.

Dam failures, while comparatively rare in history, are still fearfully projected to cause great damages and casualties when they occur. Because of this, it is considered a quote unquote installations containing dangerous forces by International humanitarian law. Youre not likely to find any prefab and makeshift dams anywhere, not even in relatively unindustrialized areas because, most likely, all the dams you know and see took great and exceptional architecture and engineering.

The making of a model is necessary here. With this blueprint, the engineer may already be able to predict the performance of the structure. This blueprinting is synonymous with characterization. Among its tasks is to identify the properties of this massive basin, like its porosity, saturation, permeability, and suggest corresponding solutions to these recognized problems.

The more systematic and substantiated the characterization is, the more likely warranted it is with better performance and maintenance. All the crucial data, like the dams location, the areas type of soil, and the seismic properties of land, go to coalesce in a functional and practicable geometric concept. This characterizing also makes the estimation of reserves and the projections of possibilities of future development feasible.

The relevance of characterization magnifies twofold when we are talking about the oil and gas industry. After all, reservoirs are used for all kinds of fluids besides water, such as hydrocarbons or gas. During the characterization, or the making of a dams computer model, the capabilities of better estimating reserves, further developing the field, and predicting future production are considerably enhanced.

Products and services are available that enable better, more accurate characterizations. To cap off, this is often carried out by highly regarded scientists and professionals. This is necessary because the study of reservoirs is often compounded with a need for knowledge in other areas like geology, geophysics, and petrophysics.

Services in this field range from licensing, exploration, appraisal, development and production ofsubsurface assets of the client. The technology includes seismic data conditioning, rock physics analysis, seismic inversion, fluid prediction, and pore pressure prediction. There are services concerningpetrophysics, geology, geomechanics, geophysics, dam engineering, reservoir testing, wireline conveyance, petrotechnics, and real time operations support.

There is a service catering to petrophysical concerns on the evaluation of the rocks and the reservoirs fluid content. There is also an on hand evaluation on the producibility of hydrocarbon reserves. This evaluation can be necessary when a builder or contractor is deciding where to drill next or trying to devise long term field development strategies. Reservoir testing can also be availed. This already entails everything from exploration to appraisal and will grant estimation on the productivity, fluid properties, composition, flow, pressure, and temperature of the dam.

A thin line can make the ultimate difference in separating good from low quality reservoirs. Clear, controlled, methodical, mathematical, and scientific techniques, down to the lowest echelons are responsible for this niggling difference. And these are the boons brought about by reservoir characterization.




About the Author: