Scope
Depending on fluid composition, there is a real risk that phase separation can occur through a lack of confining pressure during production from shale reservoirs, thereby resulting in sudden changes in relative permeability and associated drops in production rate. This is especially the case where maturity ranges from light oil to gas condensate. Such is the situation for the Eagle Ford shale, a Cretaceous formation in south eastern Texas, USA, one of the most prolific unconventional resource plays worldwide.

This project will investigate among other things the fluid compositional evolution as a function of increasing maturity as well as the geochemical heterogeneity of the Eagle Ford shale. The main analytical focus will be to divide the Eagle Ford into petroleum type organofacies and bulk kinetic assemblages using samples both from within the study area and elsewhere, integrating them into a representative maturity series. Key facies will be numerically modelled in order to correlate bulk composition, transformation ratio and PVT properties.

Goals

• establish a framework for predicting in-situ rock-fluid physical properties in order to optimize production from Eagle Ford reservoirs
• gain a fundamental understanding of the processes involved in petroleum generation, migration and expulsion
• apply a forward modeling approach to predict instantaneous compositions
• develop a novel inverse modeling approach for assessing petroleum compositions within and between wells 

Participants

• Sascha Kuske
• Brian Horsfield

Partners

• ConocoPhillips

Funding

• ConocoPhillips