How to Improve Hydrocarbon Recovery Factors from Unconventional Oil and Gas Reservoirs: New Insights and Challenges
1NALCO Champion, Sugar Land, USA
2University of Wyoming, Laramie, USA
3University of North Dakota, North Dakota, USA
How to Improve Hydrocarbon Recovery Factors from Unconventional Oil and Gas Reservoirs: New Insights and Challenges
Description
In recent years, in the energy sector, there has been a global revival in the recovery of oil and gas from unconventional resources. The ability of these rich hydrocarbon resources to sustain energy supply worldwide has attracted a significant level of interest among researchers. Despite all the promising aspects of hydrocarbon recovery, there are so many questions remaining about the mechanisms of recovery occurring under the challenging conditions of these tight reservoirs.
Some of the more common challenges faced by researchers include how to estimate original oil in place (OOIP), the definition of effective porosity in these unconventional reservoirs, uncovering the factors limiting hydrocarbon (HC) recovery from these assets and why the oil and gas recovery factors are generally low compared to conventional reservoirs, collating the best practices to improve oil and gas recovery, and slowing down the steep HC production decline curves. It is important that researchers urgently come up with solutions to these problems, in order to ensure large quantities of fuel are recovered with maximum efficiency.
In this Special Issue, we especially welcome submissions that address some of the current challenges that have been encountered by researchers in both academia and industry in this space. We welcome both original research and review articles in these areas.
Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:
- Reserve estimation
- The transport of fluids in or from ultra-tight oil/gas reservoirs
- Factors limiting the wells’ deliverability
- Maximizing the drainage area through reservoir management (optimum well spacing, frac-communications between parents and child wells, and frac-hit mitigation)
- Improved oil recovery technologies beyond fracking