The Practice of Reservoir Engineering by L. P. Dake Publisher: Elsevier Science; Revised edition (May 1, 2001) ISBN: 0444506713 Check price @ amazon.com , amazon.ca , amazon.co.uk

Malcolm Pye, PESGB

This book tells you all you need to know about reservoir engineering.

It is the long awaited update Laurie Dake's 1978 book Fundamentals of Reservoir Engineering and whereas that book was dry as dust, this new book is written with a wit and style as befits a man at the top of his profession. Does anybody else have an OBE for services to reservoir engineering?

It's a practical book with special emphasis on the offshore, concerned with processes on the scale of hillsides not coreplugs. It begins with an introduction inspired by the absence of the word reservoir in Daniel Yergin's history of the oil industry, The Prize. Armed only with Occam's Razor, Laurie tackles the observations, assumptions and calculations that underpin the subject while offering career advice en route - the best time to move jobs is when appraisal has finished and before development begins!

Relax, 90% of reservoir engineering is concerned with the application of 4 physical principles:

• The conservation of mass
• Darcy's Law
• Isothermal compressibility
• Newton's laws of motion

The second chapter is concerned with appraisal with useful advice on the use of the RFT to define contacts and a section on unitisation, the first time I can remember seeing this covered in a textbook. On the testing of appraisal wells Laurie's sound advice is:

• Appraisal wells should be perforated just as if they were development wells.

He goes on to show how this advice wasn't followed in the testing of an exploration well which any ex-Britoiler will recognise as 30/17b-2, the Clyde discovery well. Since he was Chief Reservoir Engineer at the time, this is a thinly disguised exercise in self-flagellation!

Laurie's one-man mission to put material balance alongside reservoir simulation as the key techniques in reservoir engineering, is covered in chapter 3. Since there can be 8 unknowns in the material balance equation, great care must be exercised in any assumptions made in its application.

Oilwell testing is covered in chapter 4 and the need for long pressure build-up is questioned. If this is the case the time taken to test wells could be considerably reduced with consequent savings in rig-time and well costs.

Chapter 5 is Laurie's masterpiece, 150 pages on waterdrive which could be published as a book in its own right. Drawing on examples from the North Sea, the biggest laboratory ever for the study of waterdrive it demolishes the misconceptions that have grown up over relative permeability curves and stresses the importance of the fractional flow equation in understanding fluid displacement. The section on the effects of vertical permeability distributions on waterflooding should be required reading for every oil company geologist.

The last chapter tackles gas reservoir engineering, a timely read for those who have ignored the possibility of an active aquifer in their gas fields. Gas injection and recycling are also covered with the critical effect reservoir heterogeneity can have on recycling stressed.

Finally, a thought-provoking quote from chapter 1:

Even now, in a mature producing area like the North Sea, the fact that some entrepreneurial outfit has found a minor oil accumulation grabs the newspaper headlines whereas the fact that an operator may have peformed a series of successful, innovative workovers or modified a water injection project, which receovers twice as much oil as contained in the minor discovery, is a dull statistic that remains buried in the filing cabinet.

Not a sentiment I can recall ever hearing outside the Guinea. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Book Description

This revised edition of the bestselling Practice of Reservoir Engineering has been written for those in the oil industry requiring a working knowledge of how the complex subject of hydrocarbon reservoir engineering can be applied in the field in a practical manner. Containing additions and corrections to the first edition, the book is a simple statement of how to do the job and is particularly suitable for reservoir/production engineers as well as those associated with hydrocarbon recovery.

This practical book approaches the basic limitations of reservoir engineering with the basic tenet of science: Occam's Razor, which applies to reservoir engineering to a greater extent than for most physical sciences - if there are two ways to account for a physical phenomenon, it is the simpler that is the more useful. Therefore, simplicity is the theme of this volume.

Customer Reviews

A Goldmine of a Book, December 16, 2002
Reviewer: A reader from New Mexico
One of the few true "must read" books in the field.

Mr. Dake's book is unique -- reading it is like working side-by-side with an exceptionally intelligent, erudite, experienced engineer. Despite the author's wry conversational style, this is not a light volume that can be absorbed by speed-reading. The author is sharing decades worth of real-world experience, and it merits close study.

For example, after all the thick volumes that have been written on oil well testing, who would expect that there could be anything left to say? Yet Dake's approach to well testing is eye-opening, and will certainly influence this engineer's approach to designing & interpreting well tests.

Experienced engineers may find themselves wanting to argue with some of the author's opinions & recommendations, but they will conclude that the time they invested in studying this book was well spent.

A grand legacy, March 18, 2002
Reviewer: A reader from Bakersfield, CA USA
This book is all that one would expect from Dake, and more. The long awaited update bridges the gaps left as technology has moved on since the original publication. Unfortunately Laurie is no longer with us and this publication is one of many fitting and lasting legacies.