SPE Live Podcast: The Role of Pressure Transient Analysis in CCUS Projects

Pressure transient analysis (PTA) is an important tool for petroleum engineers to characterize and evaluate oil and gas reservoirs. This is particularly true during the exploration and appraisal stages of a project to understand the nature of the reservoir and derive some of its critical properties but is also very valuable as a monitoring tool to track the evolution of properties altered by production operations or fluid fronts. The associated literature is rich in models, tools and methodologies that have been built over decades.

Similar questions need to be answered in CO2 injection projects to characterize injectivity, formation petrophysical properties, reservoir extent or fluid front movements, however PTA does not appear to have garnered much interest for those applications. Be it in saline aquifers or in depleted oil and gas reservoirs, the application of PTA techniques either as evaluation or monitoring tools does not appear to have been studied extensively, even though physical phenomenon can potentially be more complex considering relative permeability changes, miscibility effects, phase changes, geochemical or geomechanical effects that can impact CO2 injection processes.

This SPE Live aims at reviewing the state of the art and the current limitations of PTA usage for CCUS applications, determining areas of future research to better understand the impact of the physical phenomena involved, as well as outline best operational practices and interpretation tools that would unlock the value of transient flow tests in that field.

Moderated by Florian Hollaender, Scientific Advisor at SLB.

Speakers: o Mehdi Zeidouni, Craft & Hawkins Department of Petroleum Engineering Louisiana State University o Anton Shchipanov, NORCE o Jordan Mimoun, Empire Well Test Consulting