ABSTRACT

The Provost Upper Mannville B Pool in east central Alberta is contained in the McLaren Formation sands of Upper Mannville age. The reservoir provides an ideal case study for developing reservoir characterization techniques, because it has several scales of heterogeneities, and there is a high density of wells, most of which have excellent core accompanied by a suite of modern wireline logs.

The reservoir was deposited in fluvial environments in a valley-fill setting. It consists of an overall fining-upward sequence composed of a lower, blocky, channel lithofacies, making up most of the reservoir, grading upward into a channel margin lithofacies. This in turn is overlain by overbank and abandonment lithofacies. Within the blocky channel lithofacies is the shale clast lithofacies comprising zones of shale clasts in a sand matrix. The reservoir is composed of four lithoflow units, the watersaturated blocky channel sands, the oil-saturated blocky channel sands, the channel margin sands, and the shale clast zones.

Petrophysical properties, such as permeability, can be characterized for each of these lithoflow units using different techniques. The oil- and water-saturated blocky channel and channel margin lithoflow units are characterized using statistical and petrographic image analysis techniques on a well- and pool-wide basis. The extremely heterogeneous shale clast lithoflow units are characterized using 2-D numerical flow simulation of actual core intervals, 3-D physical flow experiments, and scaling-up techniques to convert these results to the reservoir grid block scale. The combination of these characterization techniques provides the reservoir engineer with data at the scale required for process simulation studies.

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