Abstract Steam conformance control in horizontal injectors is important for efficient reservoir heat management in heavy oil fields. Suboptimal conformance and non-uniform heating of the reservoir can substantially impact the economics of the field development, oil production response and result in non-uniform steam breakthrough. In order to achieve the required control, it is essential to have an appropriate well completion architecture and robust surveillance.
Five fiber optic systems, each utilizing a unique steam conformance control completion configuration, have been installed in two horizontal steam injectors to help mature steam injection flow profiling and conformance control solutions. These fiber optic systems have utilized custom designed fiber optic bundles of multimode and single mode fibers, for distributed temperature sensing (DTS) and distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) respectively. Fiber optic systems were also installed in a steam injection test flow loop. All the optical fibers successfully acquired data in the wells and flow loop, measuring temperature and acoustic energy.
A portfolio of algorithms and signal processing techniques were developed to interpret the DTS and DAS data for quantitative steam injection flow profiling. The heavily instrumented flow loop environment was utilized to characterize DTS and DAS response in a design of experiment matrix to improve the flow profiling algorithms. These algorithms are based on independent physical principles derived from multiphase flow, thermal hydraulic models, acoustic effects, large data array processing, and combinations of the foregoing methods for both transient and steady state steam flow. A high-confidence flow profile is computed based upon convergence of the algorithms. The flow profiling algorithm results were further validated utilizing a dozen short-offset, injector observation wells in the reservoir that confirmed steam movement near the injectors.