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SPE 90266
Zonal Allocation and Increased Production Opportunities Using Data Mining in
Kern River
Carrie Popa, SPE, ChevronTexaco; Andrei Popa, SPE, ChevronTexaco; Andrew Cover, SPE, ChevronTexaco
Copyright 2004, Society of Petroleum Engineers Inc.
This paper was prepared for presentation at the SPE Annual Technical Conference and
Exibition held in Houston, Texas, U.S.A., 26–29 September2004.
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Abstract
This paper presents a fast and effective methodology to
estimate zonal allocation for commingled producers in amultilayer reservoir using minimal, readily available data
(well completion, historical production, sand depths, and
location data).
A set of data mining tools including
regression, neural networks, and fuzzy logic was used to
identify candidates for remedial work and the corresponding
production increase expected. This approach was applied and
executed in a portion of the Kern River fieldin California with
very promising preliminary results.
Introduction
With over 8,000 active producers, 1,200 active injectors and
100 years of production history, Kern River Field presents an
interesting challenge for data management and the identification of widespread production opportunities from that data.
Despite this vast well count, data is remarkably complete and
reliable. However,this high well count also places great demands on production engineering staff, leaving little time for
in-depth analysis of this data.
The Kern River field, located in Kern County, California,
is a heavy oil reservoir consisting of nine productive sands.
Producers are commingled with very little individual zone
production test data available. The field is currently produced
by steaminjection, and the primary production mechanism is
gravity drainage, requiring pumps to be set at or below the
bottommost oil sand to effectively produce all sands. It is
often difficult or inconclusive to determine expected oil/water
production by sand for remedial and completion decisions
from available reservoir data alone. Often the most reliable
method is a time intensive review of completionand
production history for a given part of the field to infer
oil/water production from each of the zones.

Problem Statement
It has long been observed that some wells in the Kern River
field have high production, while nearby neighbor wells are
very low producers. One hypothesis is that wells with the
pump placed at the bottom of the deeper zones are consistently
better producers.Although these deeper zones were targeted
15-30 years ago, the overall strategy since then has been to
focus on shallower zones with higher saturation – thus
overlooking the bottom sands.
With the sizeable number of wells assigned to each
engineer (over 1,200), it becomes very hard to closely monitor
each well, much less take the time to investigate this
phenomenon. This study was initiated...