Methodological and technological challenges in hydrocarbon exploitation of northern West Siberia fields: exploration and developmentс

The Arctic part of Western Siberia contains main volumes of hydrocarbon reserves and resources available for development in Russia in the ne ar future. Currently, the "NOVATEK" company is implementing major projects there to produce liquefied natural gas: "Yamal LNG" and "Ar ctic LNG 1, 2, 3". The development targets have complex geological structure, are poorly studied and located in harsh climatic and geographical conditions, far from industrialized regions. Cost-effective development of such objects is currently a major technological challenge for oil and gas industry, which necessitates the improvement of existing conventional technologies, approaches and techniques. The ar ticle summarizes the problems and main achievements of the company "NOVATEK" in exploration and development.

Materials and methods

Hydrocarbon exploration, evaluation and maturation of prospects, geological modeling, field development, integrated dynamic modeling of deposits.

Results

The main potential for maintaining production levels, incrementing highly concentrated reserves and increasing resource volumes for LNG production in Russia is located on Yamal and Gydan peninsulas. However, the explored reserves here have a complex inhomogeneous structure in terms of lithofacies, and potential resources are concentrated in sediments with low reservoir properties and high overpressure. Therefore, it is necessary to apply advanced technologies and integrated approaches to geological modeling and development for the effective exploitation of deposits.

In geological modeling, the combination of all available geological and geophysical information and the combination of different methods of modeling, depending on sediments’ depositional environment, allows a more reliable description of the distribution of properties in the inter-well space, a more reasonable assessment of lithological heterogeneity and hydrodynamic features of reservoir structure, which increases the forecast properties of geological models, which in turn reduces geological and technological risks, and allows an improvement of the quality of horizontal sidetracking during production drilling.

In field development, the integrated approach for modeling and the u se of multi-functional wells with a complex gathering system allows the implementation of development option with maximum oil production during the period of beneficial tax treatment for tight reserves, thus ensuring the best economic effect of the tax reduction.

The integrated model is an impor tant step towards the c reation of a digital field. The digital field, in its turn, is an ideal environment for joint work of specialists, data collection and transmission, monitoring of various processes, coordinated use of information. Integration of employees, processes and technologies allows manyfold increase of the effectiveness of the activities.

Conclusions

The process of hydrocarbon exploration and development in the nor th of West Siberia involves overcoming a number of difficulties associated with exploration, uncertainty estimation of resource volumes, geological modeling, development of complex "conventional" Cretaceous accumulations and tight Achimov and Jurassic deposits. Nevertheless, the huge resource potential of the t erritory and the effic iency of technologies used by “NOVATEK” company, confirmed by the positive results of the work in recent years, inspire confidence that the tasks will be successfully solved and the goals achieved.

The next article will address the issues of hydrocarbon production stimulation, field facilities construction, planning and drilling of wells.