Integrated reservoir management for the long term - The Carpinteria offshore field

The Carpinteria offshore field, Santa Barbara, California, has produced mor e than 200 million barrels of oil to dare. This mature field has continued operations in an economically and politically challenging environment that finally resulted in the abandonment of the field's California state leases by the lease holder. The abandoned leases, together with adjoining federal leases, are now operated by an independent producer. Los Alamos National La boratory has joined with that independent operator, Pacific Operators Offsh ore, and with the State Lands Commission of California and the Minerals Man agement Service in a unique collaborative effort to redevelop the mature fi eld This project is a part of a larger umbrella project, the Advanced Reser voir Management project (ARM) that is designed to demonstrate the worth of advanced computational tools and state-of-the-art methods for independent o il and gas producers. The Carpinteria Reservoir Redevelopment project takes a long-term view of reservoir management; as a result, our management plan includes a continuing investment in rime and technology to understand the reservoir better. In particular, we have completed an extensive reservoir c haracterization and geological modeling effort that has created a self-cons istent model, satisfying geophysical, geological, and engineering data cons traints. We have begun the engineering-intensive flow simulation phase of t he project using the current geological description of the reservoir and ar e confident that our careful efforts in geological modeling will result in a reasonable reservoir flow model.