Abstract
Reservoirs declination in Apure State, Southwestern Venezuela, demands a huge technical effort in reservoir modeling when finding drilling opportunities to increase recovery factor and maintain oil production at attractive economical levels. One of these reservoirs, Escandalosa Inferior of La Victoria Oilfield was discovered by LVT-18 in 1991 with 38 MMSTB of STOOIP and in 1998, the last of its four producing wells was closed, reaching a recovery factor of 14%.
An Asset Team revised and integrated geophysical, geological, petrophysical and production data to update Esc-Inf static model in 2005. No robust sedimentological model could be built because of cores absence; however, a facies and later a property distribution was designed with the help of well logs, regional knowledge and geostatistics.
The resulting static model led to visualize the opportunity to drill a horizontal well in the highest attic of the structure to reactivate the reservoir. STOOIP calculation for this new model yielded a value of 13 MMSTB with 7.8 MMSTB of recoverable reserves and 2.5 MMSTB of remaining reserves, which could be extracted by the new well and finally obtain a recovery factor of about 60%. The dynamic model showed a reaccommodation of fluids due to its 5 years of closure, and certified the current presence of oil in the attic where the well was previously visualized. The prediction made by the simulator for a 5 years scenario, with a production of 650 STBD, highlighted the economical feasibility of drilling this well.
Nowadays, the successful well LVT-46H is still active with 2 MSTBD and has accumulated 0.245 MMSTB, since its completion in 2006. These results validate the methodology presented in this work where data integration, the use of geostatistics and reservoir simulation are the main key for reactivating declined reservoirs and maintaining oil production.