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Ahead of Print Abstract
DOI:10.1306/09172523122
The Rebirth of the Leduc-Woodbend Nisku Oil Pool in Alberta, Canada
Mengwei Zhao and David Tian
Ahead of Print Abstract
Horizontal drilling has led to the rebirth of the Leduc-Woodbend Nisku oil pool and substantial economic returns. The original vertical-well development produced 91.4 MMBO (14.5 MM m3) in 64 years, whereas horizontal-well development has produced 17 MMBO (2.7 MMm3) of oil in the past 12 years and will produce at least 41.5 – 51.9 MMBO (6.6 – 8.3 MM m3) in the future starting in 2024. It is projected that the oil pool is destined to be a hundred-year-producing pool and could produce until at least 2075. In recent years the pool has been generating over $100 million of revenue annually and yielding free cash flow. This operational and economic success indicates that certain tight conventional oil pools like the Nisku pool contain recoverable oil reserves, which cannot be fully developed by vertical wells and still possess significant room for horizontal drilling development. The Nisku reservoir possesses low porosity ranging mainly between 1% and 6% with an arithmetic mean of 2.9 % and low permeability ranging mainly between 0.1 and 100 millidarcy (md) with an arithmetic mean of 6.8 md. If other oil-field operators thoroughly review the sedimentary settings, lithofacies and especially petrophysical parameters in their old oil pools developed only by vertical wells and compare them with those in this pool, they could determine if their oil pools still have potential for horizontal drilling before they will be, or even after they have been, abandoned.
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