Modern engineering approaches to improving production efficiency as explained by Vladislav Dorofeev, a reservoir development specialist at the Engineering Projects Department of ITMO National Research University, a petroleum reservoir engineer, and a recognized expert in digital reservoir simulation and production optimization, participating in projects for optimizing oil asset development and creating digital production analysis tools.
According to the International Energy Agency, around 70% of global oil production comes from fields that have been in development for more than 25–30 years. Yet the recovery factor at many of these fields is only 30–35% meaning roughly one third of reserves make it to the surface, while the rest of the oil remains in the reservoir.
Petroleum reservoir engineer Vladislav Dorofeev — one of the few specialists working in this demanding field — believes that modern technologies can significantly improve production efficiency even under such conditions. He is referring to digital reservoir models and probabilistic forecasting tools that enable more accurate assessments of a field's potential and support better-informed engineering decisions.
Over the past several years, he has contributed to the development of hydrodynamic models for fields with combined reserves exceeding 2.6 billion barrels of oil, developed programs of geological and technical interventions to enhance production, and created solutions that increased engineering calculation throughput sevenfold while improving production forecast accuracy by approximately 15%.
We asked Vladislav Dorofeev which approaches are enabling to increase oil recovery from already mature fields today.
Why Does Every Field Require Its Own Calculations?
Before getting into the tools, it is important to understand one fundamental point."There is no universal formula in oil production,"Vladislav Dorofeev cautions. Every field has its own geology: rock structure, permeability, reservoir pressure, and dozens of other parameters. This forces engineers to build a new calculation framework for every asset from scratch, and the mathematical development models for different fields can differ radically.
"Today, a field is first studied in a digital environment and only then at the drill site," Vladislav Dorofeev emphasizes."The work unfolds in several stages: first, we build detailed reservoir models and test various development scenarios to evaluate their impact on production; then we assess the economic viability of the decisions; and finally, all the calculations are integrated into a unified model. Throughout this process, we make extensive use of proprietary analytical tools for working with production data."
In his work, he has analyzed fields across a wide range of geological conditions. The depth range of the assets he has worked with spans from 600 meters to 3.5 kilometers. Such a difference in conditions directly influences the choice of engineering solutions including how the reservoir pressure maintenance system is structured.
How to Optimize a Pressure Maintenance System
One of the central challenges of mature fields is the gradual decline of reservoir pressure, the expert notes. As pressure drops, oil flows into wells less readily, leading to falling production rates. To keep operations stable, fields use water injection systems that displace oil from the reservoir. However, these systems require precise calibration and consume significant amounts of energy, making their optimization an important engineering objective.
In one project, Vladislav Dorofeev was involved in analyzing the waterflooding infrastructure and developing recommendations for optimizing water injection.
"My team and I conducted a detailed analysis of the reservoir pressure maintenance system and identified zones where injection volumes could be reduced without any projected loss of oil production. This allowed us to optimize the cost of maintaining pressure across the infrastructure," he explains.
As a result of implementing the proposed solutions, operating production costs were reduced by approximately 11%, delivering an economic benefit of around $1.7 million per year.
A separate area of work involves identifying so-called "undrained" reservoir zones. Even in producing fields, a portion of reserves may remain outside the drainage area due to suboptimal well placement. In such cases, an additional analysis of the geology and the current development system is carried out: areas with residual potential are identified, and new wells are then designed accordingly.
This approach makes it possible to bring previously bypassed reserves back into production and improve overall development efficiency without expanding the resource base.
This is a meaningful result: in some cases, well-executed optimization can sustain production from wells that might otherwise have been written off as uneconomic. Making such decisions, however, requires an accurate understanding of each well's potential.
How Engineers Forecast Production Potential
Another complex challenge in reservoir development is forecasting well production. Because reservoir rock is geologically heterogeneous, actual production figures can differ substantially from calculated ones. To reduce this uncertainty, Vladislav Dorofeev developed a probabilistic tool for calculating a well's initial flow rate and served as the methodological lead for its application. The tool models multiple production scenarios simultaneously ranging from optimistic to conservative accounting for various reservoir parameters.
"A single number in a forecast is always an illusion of precision. In reality, a well can behave in a completely different way. That is why we always work with a range — it provides a far more reliable basis for decision-making,"Dorofeev notes.
He applied this approach when forecasting production across dozens of reservoirs, which led to a marked improvement in the accuracy of future production estimates. To scale the methodology, Vladislav Dorofeev developed a training program and prepared 20 super-user engineers, who then rolled it out across their own teams. The tool he created was integrated into the company's production workflows and is currently used by more than 100 engineers, having become part of the standard approach to production analysis and forecasting.
Working with Tight Reserves and the Future of Oil Production
One of the key frontiers of modern oil production is working with tight, or hard-to-recover, reserves. Such fields are characterized by low rock permeability: fluids move through them with difficulty, making conventional reservoir pressure maintenance methods largely ineffective.
"The core problem is in low actual reservoir pressure with no way to restore it through waterflooding. Low-permeability reservoirs simply cannot absorb water at the required rate", Vladislav Dorofeev explains.
Under these conditions, engineers must develop specialized programs of geological and technical interventions tailored to the specific characteristics of the reservoir. This approach demands precise modeling and comprehensive data analysis.
In practice, such solutions deliver tangible results. Vladislav Dorofeev's involvement in developing these programs helped unlock additional production of more than 160,000 barrels of oil across a number of projects.
According to him, advances in digital technology are gradually reshaping the very logic of oil asset management. "Modern reservoir development is becoming an increasingly analytical discipline. The more precisely we understand reservoir behavior and production dynamics, the more effectively we can manage development and extend the operational life of fields,"he notes.
It is precisely this combination of engineering expertise, digital models, and analytical tools that today makes it possible to find additional production reserves even at fields previously considered all but exhausted.
"Today, the main growth potential in many regions lies not so much in discovering new fields as in managing already-developed assets more precisely through reservoir modeling, production analysis, and infrastructure optimization," the expert emphasizes.
In this way, revisiting existing wells and mature fields is becoming not only technically feasible, but economically justified: it reduces capital expenditure, makes more efficient use of existing infrastructure, and recovers additional oil without large-scale investment in exploration.
As the industry shifts toward a data-driven approach, specialists with expertise in digital modeling and analytics play a pivotal role in improving production efficiency, reducing costs, and extending the life cycle of mature oil assets. The work of Vladislav Dorofeev demonstrates that solutions of exactly this kind are shaping the future of the oil and gas industry.
