Reservoir Engineering Fundamentals

Learn crude oil properties, including density, specific gravity, API, and gas solubility, and apply bubble point, formation volume factors, and oil viscosity in reservoir calculations.

Explore natural gas properties under reservoir conditions, including gas density, specific gravity, deviation factor, isothermal combustibility factor, gas formation volume factor, and gas viscosity, with subsurface to surface unit conversions.

Explore multilayered reservoirs and learn to calculate the original oil in place by computing bulk volume from areas and thickness using trapezoid or pyramid methods for field and metric units.

Learn to estimate proven, probable, and possible reserves using P90, P50, and P10 probabilities, demonstrated by a field-data example solving for P1, P2, and P3.

Explore fluid pressure regimes and hydrocarbon contacts in reservoirs, including water oil and gas oil contacts, and how pressure gradients and depth determine interface pressures.

Explore drive mechanisms that sustain hydrocarbon production, including water drive, gas cap, solution gas, liquid and rock expansion, and gravity drainage, with their efficiency and impact on reservoir pressure.

Define the recovery factor as a fraction of hydrocarbon recoverable from a reservoir and outline American and European classifications, including primary, secondary, and tertiary recovery.

Explore drive indices that quantify the efficiency of solution gas and oil shrinkage, gas cap, water, and liquid and rock expansion drives, and their energy plot from production data.

Explore applications of the material balance equation in oil reservoirs, calculating parameters and gas-to-oil ratios under water drive, gas cap, and volumetric conditions.

Apply material balance to determine oil saturation and dynamic fluid contacts, accounting for gas cap expansion, water influx, and volume-based depth calculations in multilayer reservoirs.

Explore fractional flow in reservoir engineering by linking movable water saturation and movable oil saturation to front formation, water injection, and displacement toward the production well.

Apply one-dimensional displacement to compute fractional water flow versus saturation. Determine flood-front and breakthrough saturations and estimate residual oil behind the front at a 25 percent water cut.

Define mobility, displacement efficiency, and mobility ratio, linking them to relative probability curves and fractional flow. Discuss how pattern type, gravity segregation, and vertical sweep efficiency influence overall sweep efficiency.

Learn to identify and forecast production with decline curve analysis, applying exponential, harmonic, or hyperbolic models using production history to estimate ultimate recovery and remaining reserves.