This paper was prepared for presentation at the 1999 SPE Latin American and Caribbean Petroleum Engineering Conference held in Caracas, Venezuela, 21-23 April, 1999.

PDVSA's light oilfields in Lake Maracaibo have been under exploitation for more than four decades, with expected recovery of only 29% of the OOIP. As these resources approach maturity, it has been realized that improving recovery will demand the earliest use of many technologies, proven and new, in an integrated manner and tailored to solve specific regional problems. The integrated field laboratory (IFL) philosophy is one of PDVSA's main technology strategies designed to accomplish these goals. Three field laboratories are being developed in the Lake Maracaibo Basin: one for heavy oils and two for light oils: shallow and deep reservoirs.

The VLA-6/9/21 area in Lagomar Field was selected to evaluate technologies with potential application to highly depleted, medium to light oil reservoirs, which are either under or have favorable conditions for waterflooding and at depths below 10000 feet. Venezuela has over 30000 MMSTB of oil currently in place in reservoirs with similar conditions. This huge volume of oil provides the incentive to conduct the work described in this paper.

The engineering management approach for technology evaluation being used is comprised of: 1)Advanced reservoir characterization, simulation and visualization, 2)Drainage strategies, including displacement processes and well architectures, 3)Well construction at minimum time, damage, and cost, 4)Technologies to improve injectivity/productivity, 5)Advanced monitoring technologies aiming to intelligent reservoirs, 6)Technologies for handling produced and injected fluids and 7)Techniques to evaluate and quantify risk.

Multidisciplinary teams are being integrated with specialists from different disciplines within PDVSA, Intevep, universities, service companies, etc.

This paper describes the results obtained during the first year of operations of Lagomar's Field Laboratory. Some of the technologies currently under evaluation are: