Abstract

Well placement for unconventional oil reservoirs has significant economic impact for a field development prospective. Optimizing recoverable reserves from these reservoirs requires proper placement of horizontal well bores, drilling the laterals in right direction and keeping the lateral portion of the well bores in the target layer. It further requires production stimulation by hydraulic fracturing of the rocks in order to induce fractures extending laterally from the horizontal well bore. In this article, a method is presented to identify the optimum horizontal well drilling location by integrating geological, geophysical, geomechanical and petrophysical parameters using seismic and well data from a basin in China. Available 3D seismic, wells and image logs were interpreted and integrated into a conceptual geological model. A model-based seismic inversion algorithm was implemented to predict acoustic impedance (AI). A geomechanical model was developed for the field, which provided the reservoir pressure, in-situ stresses and rock properties to predict the optimal well trajectory. The seismic amplitude time slices generated at the top of the target show a wide zone of amplitude anomalies corresponding to the meandering channels interpreted from the image log analysis. The horizontal well was successfully drilled in the reservoir sands.