Advances in Reservoir Testing on Wireline in Deep Water Mexico for Reserves Estimations and Reservoir Delineation

Reservoir testing is a fundamental part of the oil and gas reservoir evaluation with impact on project economics. A conventional approach to assess reserves and producibility involves flowing the well to surface and disposing of the produced fluid. This necessitates a disposal boat and represents high costs and potential environmental concerns. Companies have been looking for alternatives to de-risk reservoir characterization while reducing times and costs associated with testing, without compromising local requirements for reserves classification.

Interval Pressure Transient Testing (IPTT), combined with downhole fluid analysis (DFA) to assess reservoir characteristics and performance layer by layer, has been the methodology of choice in Mexico.

We examine examples of IPTT acquisitions offshore Mexico, where fluid characteristics from DFA and productive potential were evaluated, and production forecasts were compared to conventional well tests. We also examine examples of use of novel Reservoir Fluid Geodynamic (RFG) studies in Exploration-Appraisal settings to resolve for reservoir architecture and de-risk future developments.