The following 16 pages are in this category, out of 16 total.

This chapter concerns the use of water injection to increase the production from oil reservoirs, and the technologies that have been developed over the past 50 years to evaluate, design, operate, and monitor such projects. Use of water to increase oil production is known as "secondary recovery" and typically follows "primary production," which uses the reservoir's natural energy (fluid and rock expansion, solution-gas drive, gravity drainage, and aquifer influx) to produce oil. The principal reason for waterflooding an oil reservoir is to increase the oil-production rate and, ultimately, the oil recovery. This is accomplished by "voidage replacement"--injection of water to increase the reservoir pressure to its initial level and maintain it near that pressure. The water displaces oil from the pore spaces, but the efficiency of such displacement depends on many factors (e.g., oil viscosity and rock characteristics).

Kirkuk is a supergiant oil reservoir located in Iraq. Kirkuk began production in 1934, and 2 billion bbl of oil were produced before water injection was implemented in 1961. From 1961 to 1971, 3.2 billion bbl of oil were produced under pressure maintenance by waterdrive using river water. The 1971 production rate was approximately 1.1 million barrels of oil per day (BOPD). Since then, the field has continued to produce large volumes of oil by voidage-replacement water injection; however, few production details for recent years appear in the technical literature.

San Andres and Clearfork are two carbonate reservoir intervals that are present over a considerable area of the Permian Basin in west Texas. These reservoirs (e.g., Wasson, Slaughter, Seminole) contain several billion bbl of approximately 30 API oil. They are very-layered, heterogeneous carbonates and dolomites that have large variation in permeability from layer to layer. Interestingly, because of the complex hydrocarbon-accumulation history of this basin, much of this area has an underlying interval that contains residual oil saturation. Most of these reservoirs were discovered in the late 1930s and the 1940s.

There are many opportunities to modify and improve the waterflood as data are acquired and analyzed. Applying material balance concepts means that initially there is "reservoir fill-up" if the reservoir previously had some years of primary production. During this period, the reservoir is repressured to its original reservoir pressure because the injected-water volumes will be substantially greater than the produced-fluid volumes. Thereafter, the waterflood will be operated as a voidage-replacement process. The earliest waterflood monitoring techniques were developed soon after the first field applications of waterflooding; they were based on simple plots, maps, and calculations.

The value and importance of tracer tests are broadly recognized. Tracer testing has become a mature technology, and improved knowledge about tracer behavior in the reservoir, improved tracer analysis, and reduction of pitfalls have made tracer tests reliable. Many tracer compounds exist; however, the number of suitable compounds for well-to-well tracers is reduced considerably because of the harsh environment that exists in many reservoirs and the long testing period. Radioactive tracers with a half-life of less than one year are mentioned only briefly in this chapter because of their limited applicability in long-term tests. Tracers may be roughly classified as passive or active.

Ideally, fluid properties such as bubblepoint pressure, solution gas/oil ratio, formation volume factor and others are determined from laboratory studies designed to duplicate the conditions of interest. However, experimental data are quite often unavailable because representative samples cannot be obtained or the producing horizon does not warrant the expense of an in-depth reservoir fluid study. In these cases, pressure-volume-temperature (PVT) properties must be determined by analogy or through the use of empirically derived correlations. This page introduces these correlations and provides links to more in-depth calculations. The calculation of reserves in an oil reservoir or the determination of its performance requires knowledge of the fluid's physical properties at elevated pressure and temperature.

The design of a waterflood has many phases. First, simple engineering evaluation techniques are used to determine whether the reservoir meets the minimum technical and economic criteria for a successful waterflood. If so, then more-detailed technical calculations are made. These include the full range of engineering and geoscience studies. The geologists must develop as complete an understanding as possible of the internal character of the pay intervals and of the continuity of nonpay intervals.

Before computer modeling was common, the 3D aspects of a waterflood evaluation were simplified so that the technical problem could be treated as either a 2D-areal problem or a 2D-vertical problem. To simplify 3D to 2D areal, either the reservoir must be assumed to be vertically a thin and homogeneous rock interval (hence having no gravity considerations) or one of the published techniques to handle the vertical heterogeneity and expected gravity effects within the context of a 2D-areal calculation must be used. The primary areal considerations for a waterflood involve the choices of the pattern style (see Figure 1[1]) and the well spacing. Maximizing the ultimate oil recovery and economic return from waterflooding requires making many pattern- and spacing-related decisions when secondary recovery is evaluated. This has been particularly true for onshore oil fields in the US in which a significant number of wells were drilled for primary production.

This section discusses the impact of vertical variations in permeability and the effect of gravity on simple 2D reservoir situations in which the areal effects are ignored. Gravity effects always are present because for any potential waterflood project, oil always is less dense than water, even more so after the gas is included that is dissolved in the oil at reservoir conditions. The discussion below does not include the Pc effects on vertical saturation distributions. Through countercurrent imbibition, Pc effects help to counteract nonequilibrium water/oil saturation distributions. The mathematics of including Pc effects makes the problems too complicated for inclusion here.