Greater Burgan is the second largest oil field in the world. It holds 60 billion barrels recoverable oil out of 100 billion barrels of Kuwaiti reserve, which accounts to 10% of the world oil reserve. Viscosity prediction using correlations is commonly used in the petroleum industry for solving many of reservoir engineering and surface production operational problems. During the last seven decades, several viscosity correlations were developed. However, these correlations maybe useful only for the geological region it was developed from, and do not provide satisfactory results for crude oils from other regions. This project evaluates the most known and published viscosity models of hydrocarbon fluids in the industry. These models were used to predict viscosity measurements of 66 different oils from the Greater Burgan Oil Field. Additionally, the effect of reservoir parameters on oil viscosity was studied using an adequate data set. This study also presents an assessment of the commonly known oil viscosity models which are based on easily measured parameters. Models evaluation and comparison between the predicted and measured viscosity using the data set showed that the existing models can predict the oil viscosity with an absolute average relative error (AARE) of 13% for dead, 14% for bubble point, 6% for undersaturated, and 8% for saturated oil viscosity.
Based on Greater Burgan Oil reservoir measurements; new simple integrated oil viscosity correlations were developed for estimating dead, bubble point, saturated, and undersaturated oil viscosities. The new correlations are integrated and are used together to reduce the viscosity laboratory measurements. These correlations have been derived using 824 data points of oil viscosity measurements. The validity and accuracy of these models have been confirmed by comparing the obtained results from these correlations using 166 data points from the field itself. The new correlation showed a better accuracy in estimating oil viscosity in all pressure regimes compared to the previously published viscosity models. Results show that the viscosity of Greater Burgan Oil Field crudes can be predicted with average absolute errors of 5.8% for dead oil viscosity, 5.4% for bubble point oil viscosity, 2% for undersaturated oil viscosity, and 4.8% for saturated oil viscosity using the newly developed models. The new proposed models are integrated, much simpler, and more accurate than the published models when it is applied to Burgan Oil Field Crudes.
