Effect of hydrodynamic tilting at fluid contacts to reservoir production performance

Down-flush hydrodynamic movement of fluids at at transitional zones towards areas with low pressure gradients have been reported to directly influence the accurate prediction of petroleum reservoir's production performances over time. Fluctuations in the fluid-fluid interactions and pressure changes around the reference line was the major cause for the discrepancy. In this research, a sensitivity study on the influence of hydrodynamic tilt factor h to oil, water and gas production was carried-out by means of the commercial software Eclipse Black oil simulator using the openSource Norne field data. The constant h is a function of the corrected shut-in pressure, fluid specific gravity at contact base-lines, pressure at the reference elevation and at the oil-water contact. The error in the contact depth was captured using the difference between the initial and calculated true vertical depths of the fluid's contact zones. The obtained information was fed into the simulator to model the process dynamics. Findings revealed that the error margin for the first case hA (gas-oil contact) was insignificant. However, a mean deviation in the reservoir's production predictions of atleast 8% for approximately a 6.5% change in the interacting fluids density was attained in-contrast to the base case.