Revitalizing a mature oil play: Strategies for finding and producing unrecovered oil in Frio Fluvial-Deltaic reservoirs of south Texas. Technical progress report, April 1, 1996--June 30, 1996

Advanced reservoir characterization techniques have been applied to selected reservoirs in the Frio Fluvial-Deltaic Sandstone (Vicksburg Fault Zone) trend of South Texas in order to maximize the economic producibility of resources in this mature oil play. More than half of the reservoirs in this depositionally complex play have already been abandoned, and large volumes of oil may remain unproduced unless advanced characterization techniques are applied to define untapped, incompletely drained, and new pool reservoirs as suitable targets for near-term recovery methods. This project has developed interwell-scale geological facies models and has assessed engineering attributes of Frio fluvial-deltaic reservoirs in selected fields in order to characterize reservoir architecture, flow unit boundaries, and the controls that these characteristics exert on the location and volume of unrecovered mobile and residual oil. Results of these studies led to the identification of specific opportunities to exploit these heterogeneous reservoirs for incremental recovery by recompletion and strategic infill drilling