Cost-effective Computer Tools for Kansas Independents

Background

Computer technologies have been widely adopted in petroleum industry. However, many critical technologies are aimed at the large integrated company operating major fields. There is a critical demand to modify and develop cost-effective computer application for the independent operator.

Current Activities

As part of the DOE funded demonstration projects, the KU Energy Research Center (ERC), the Tertiary Oil Recovery Project (TORP) and the Kansas Geological Survey (KGS) are working with oil and gas operators to develop tools and techniques for computer aided reservoir description and analysis. These tools include low-cost easy-to-use spreadsheet log analysis software (PfEFFER), and an extension of the freeware BOAST-3 computer program for full field reservoir simulation.

PFEFFER was tested and successfully applied in Schaben Field, and grew out of the "SuperPickett" crossplot that was initially developed and applied as part of other DOE funding (DOE/BC/14434-13). PFEFFER stands for "Petrofacies Evaluation of Formations For Engineering Reservoirs" (Doveton et al., 1995). PFEFFER v. 1 was released January 2, 1996 as a commercial spreadsheet-based well-log analysis program developed and distributed through the Kansas Geological Survey. PFEFFER v. 1 software was developed as a separate project with one year of additional funding provided by twelve major and small independent companies. Additional funding for development of an enhanced PFEFFER was provided by industry and USDOE. PFEFFER was designed as a means to obtain timely, inexpensive, but reliable and consistent reservoir characterization using the limited available information, staff, and technical resources (a major problem identified by independent producers). PFEFFER is an interactive spreadsheet-based program that is designed to run as an add-in to Excel version 5.0 or later and is written in Visual Basic.

Future Activities

A proposal to DOE is in preparation to develop a web-based reservoir description and analysis package using JAVA programming language and integrated with the online relational database management systems developed for the Kansas petroleum industry. (This was subsequently funded as GEMINI.)

KU Contact: Lynn Watney, 785-864-3965, lwatney@kgs.ukans.edu