Title: Management of cross-border hydrocarbon migration in various development plans, a case study of shared oil and gas fields

Authors: Mahdi Hasanvand; Sara Shokrollahzadeh Behbahani; Abolfazl Hashemi

Addresses: Research Institute of Petroleum Industry, South Line of Azadi Sport Complex, P.O. Box 14665-137, Tehran, Iran ' Amirkabir University of Technology, Hafez Street, P.O. Box 15875-4413, Iran, Tehran ' Arvandan Oil and Gas Company, Imam Khamenei Street, P.O. Box 61838-73799, Khoramshahr, Iran

Abstract: A reservoir that has formed through millions of years of sedimentation almost never conforms to the established borderlines that define political entities or legal jurisdictions of neighbouring countries. The term shared reservoir is given to such hydrocarbon deposits. While it is a country's right to exploit its underground resources as it wishes, any production from a shared reservoir can have irreversible consequences for the whole reservoir. This study investigates all main factors that influence production from shared oil and gas reservoirs and demonstrates how and the extent to which each neighbouring country is affected by variations of these factors. Then, the findings are applied to an Iranian-Qatari shared gas-condensate reservoir to investigate gas migration. In this study, Eclipse software is used for the simulation of the shared reservoir based on published field data.

Keywords: reservoir simulation; shared reservoirs; optimised production; crude migration; influential factors; cross-border migration; hydrocarbon migration; case study; oil fields; gas fields; gas migration; Iran; Qatar.

DOI: 10.1504/IJPE.2014.064762

International Journal of Petroleum Engineering, 2014 Vol.1 No.2, pp.111 - 125

Received: 24 Feb 2013
Accepted: 24 Nov 2013
Published online: 30 Sep 2014 *

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