SPWLA Distinguished Speaker Series. Reservoirs can be subject to many complexities associated with a variety of dynamic processes in geologic time; the new technical discipline “reservoir fluid geodynamics” (RFG) is designed to treat the full range of these processes in order to yield improved understanding of production concerns. RFG is enabled in part by having the development of the Flory-Huggins-Zuo equation of state and its reliance on the Yen- Mullins model of asphaltenes which is the first EoS to predict asphaltene gradients. In addition, RFG is enabled by gradient data for thermodynamic analysis from DFA, and by a decade of oilfield case studies. Processes that have been well studied in the past such as biodegradation are subsumed within RFG. Here, we present a series of reservoirs that are subject to multiple complexities including biodegradation, water washing, multiple charging, spill-fill, and thermal maturity variations. The combination of DFA and thermodynamic modeling coupled with compositional analysis, especially two dimensional gas chromatography, and geochemical analysis, unravels all these complexities and enables viscosity mapping in the reservoirs. The RFG perspective is found to offer improved reservoir characterization even for processes that have been highly studied in years past.

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