Journal of Petroleum & Environmental Biotechnology

Abstract

Rigorous Modeling of Solution Gas–Oil Ratios for a Wide Ranges of Reservoir Fluid Properties

Arash Kamari, Sohrab Zendehboudi, James J Sheng*, Amir H Mohammadi* and Deresh Ramjugernath

The reservoir fluid properties, the solution gas–oil ratio (GOR), are of great importance in various aspects of petroleum engineering. Therefore, a rapid means for estimating such parameters is much sort after. In this study, the linear interaction and general optimization method is applied in the development of a precise and reliable model for estimating the solution GOR. In order to develop a model that would be comprehensive, a reliable and extensive databank comprising of more than 1000 datasets collected from various geographical locations, including Asia, Mediterranean Basin, North America, Africa, and Middle East was compiled. Furthermore, the model developed was benchmarked against widely-used empirical methods in order to evaluate the performance of method proposed in predicting solution GOR data. The results show that the model proposed in this study outperforms the empirical methods to which it was compared. This study also investigated the influence of the reservoir fluid properties on the estimated solution GOR for the newly- developed model. Results show that bubble point pressure and gas gravity have the largest and the smallest influences on the predicted solution GOR, respectively. Finally, the Leverage approach was applied to determine the applicability domain for the proposed method via the detection of outlier data points. It was determined that only 26 data points, out of more than 1000 data, are identified as outlier data points.