Estimation of barrel of oil equivalent of gas using PVT multi-stage separation data. 9th Middle East Geosciences Conference, GEO 2010.

Abstract

Over the last sixty years, Kuwait’s gas production has been mainly coming from associated gas sources from its large and thick reservoirs undergoing natural depletion. Recent discoveries of deep Jurassic gas have considerably changed the overall relative make-up of the gas stream. The current gas stream includes gas production from existing oil reservoirs, deep gas reservoirs, condensate, and volatile oil reservoirs. As a result of this, the gas stream is becoming richer. However, in the past there has been no systematic attempt to understand and estimate the barrel of oil-equivalent (BOE) of overall gas based on the relative contribution from the reservoirs in Kuwait. This study is a first attempt to develop a new methodology and process to estimate the BOE factor for Kuwait taking into account all the major oil and gas producing reservoirs in Kuwait. The study considered all gas composition information including PVT test data on all PVT samples for more than 200 wells and gas outlet points. It focused on the gas compositional behavior and the amount of energy associated with different sources of gas. The study shows that any oil company must develop and adopt its own BOE factor for reporting the gas volumes in terms of oil equivalent. Key technical contributions of this work include: data evaluation techniques, estimation of calorific values and conversion of the calorific value to BOE factor (per well, reservoir, field and company), and general correlations of gas and fluid properties for quick projection of BOE value.