injector

A successful water injection management is a key to increase or stabilize oil production and to maximize oil recovery from a mature field. This paper describes an approach to draw maximum benefit through existing set up of a water injection in a mature offshore carbonate field of India. Water injection initiated after the six years of oil production and field is under water flood since last 28 years. The field witnessed favorable water flood condition and almost negligible aquifer support. During its long production period most of the producers had been sideracked from one to three times to target better saturation areas which has led to uneven subsurface water distribution. The field has also suffered less voidage compensation for quite some time.

To understand and mitigate the problem, a small pilot area within a field has been selected for implementing a good surveillance and monitoring program with pattern injection and possible intervention strategy. It was decided that based on the success of this pilot, the concept would be developed for implementation in step by step manner for entire field. The importance of multidisciplinary team has been recognized and detailed SWOT analysis was done for effective implementation of plan. Initially pilot area comprised of 15 oil producers and 4 water injectors. Conversion of one producer to water injector and restoration of water injection in 3 injectors were done as per plan and optimized injection rate (in this case maximum 3000 bbl per day) per injector were implemented. Peripheral pattern for pilot area with 5 injectors and 5 spot inverted patterns from rest 3 injectors were decided.

After one year of the implementation a thorough performance analysis of the pilot has been carried out which indicates the overall improvement of liquid and oil production rates along with reduction in GOR and decreasing trend of oil decline rates of producers.

The pilot approach has certainly helped to understand the Reservoir conformance in short duration of time. Encouraging results of this methodology guides to extent and implement this approach in other parts of field to cover the entire field in phased manner.

A case study on improving waterflood surveillance aided by a better understanding of the correlation between various water injectors and oil producers completed in the shallowest sub-layer of a giant multi-layered matured carbonate reservoir in Mumbai Offshore Basin is presented here. This understanding is then used to gauge effectiveness of the prolonged waterflood programme and to identify ‘target wells’ for optimizing water injection rate. The inferences of this analysis were tested using a simulation model.

Production, injection and pressure data of all wells completed in this sub-layer were extracted. The reservoir injection and withdrawal rates were computed using PVT data which were subsequently fed into an in-house developed streamline simulation program that generates a matrix of flow-based well rate allocation factors (WAF) correlating injection to withdrawal for each individual well as a part of its output. The analysis of injection efficiency per well was carried out in two scenarios viz. with current rates for effective waterflood surveillance and at a cumulative level with averaged rates to identify areas of deficiencies and optimize future injection rates.

Flow-based allocation factors provided a better picture than traditionally employed distance weighted technique owing to the underlying physics involved in describing streamline distribution in the reservoir. Results of analysis at the cumulative level indicated wells where injection efficiency, as measured by the ratio of injection rate to sum of streamlines-weighted withdrawal rates from connected producers, substantially deviates from 1. Few wells had an injector efficiency significantly higher than 1 which defined over-injection and potential recycling while a large number of injector wells had ratios of less than 1, highlighting the need to step-up injection rates and devise strategies for rigorous surveillance. To achieve the latter objective, injection-centric WAF's were regenerated at current situation with current rates and the dynamic nature of these factors could be observed by noting their slight difference with respect to previously estimated factors. This is attributed to averaged-out flow rates limiting the influence of newer high-rate producers and injectors. Nonetheless, wells in areas demanding attention are identified and requisite injection rates are assigned. These changes are included in the history-matched simulation model used for redevelopment activities and results were compared with a do-nothing case. The significant incremental recovery proves as a validation of the methodology adopted.

Waterflood surveillance on a well-to-well basis is always difficult in a matured field where water injectors are deployed in a ubiquitous fashion. This approach has rarely been employed in a reservoir of the size of Mumbai High and can be extended to other sub-layers subject to positive results from field implementation. Thus it is an endeavour to monitor waterflood effectiveness at a large field scale and could be beneficial for similarly developed fields.

The Mangala, Aishwaya & Bhagyam (MBA) fields are the largest discovered group of oil fields in Barmer Basin, Rajasthan, India. The fields contain medium gravity viscous crude (10-40cp) in high permeability (1-5 Darcy) sands. The fields have undergone pattern as well as peripheral water injection. In order to overcome adverse mobility ratio and improve sweep efficiency thereby increasing oil recovery, chemical EOR has been evaluated for implementation in these fields. The potential benefits from chemical enhanced oil recovery (EOR) had been recognized from early in the field development. Polymer flooding was identified for early implementation, which would be followed by stage wise implementation of Alkaline-Surfactant-Polymer (ASP) injection in fields like Mangala. Since the commencement of polymer injection, the Mangala field polymer injectors have displayed multiple injectivity issues. In addition, the Aishwarya and Bhagyam fields are dealing with low Void Replacement Ratios (VRR) for their ongoing water injection, which if not rectified could adversely affect recovery. While various types of injector stimulations are being used, injectivity increases are short lived. A new technique termed as ‘Sand Scouring’ has been successfully applied resuting in sustainable injectivity gains.

The technique involves pumping creating a small fracture with a pad injected above fracturing pressure and then scouring the fracture face with low concentration 20/40 sand slugs in range of 0.5 to 1 PPA 20/40. The treatments are pumped at the highest achievable rates with the available pumping equipment within the completion pressure limitations. Based upon the available tankage, the scheduled is designed such that pumping of a fixed volume of sand stage, a quick shut-down allows for mixing the next stage of slurry. The pumping schedule and a ‘scouring’ intent is deliberately designed to avoid requirement of fracturing equipment, related cleanout equipment and resulting costs. The challenge of conformance is addressed by designing the pumping schedule to incorporate stages of particulate diverters and validated using pre and post injection logging surveys. .

Sand scouring jobs in 16 wells have been conducted across Mangala, Bhagyam & Aishwarya injectors. Out of thesewells, 9 wells had zero injectivity while the other 7 required both injectivity and conformance improvement. Most of the treated wells resulted in multifold improvement of injectivity as compared to their prior injection parameters. Sand scouring resulted in sustained injection performance when compared with prior conventional methods of stimulation. Injectivity improvements from sand scouring lasted for an average of 3 months days as compared to 14 days for the conventional stimulations. Sand scouring evolution, design, results and plans for future improvement are all discussed in this paper.

Pressure maintenance by gas injection in gas cap is one of the well-established methods for improving the ultimate recovery. Gas injection in the crestal part of reservoir into the primary or secondary gas cap for pressure maintenance is generally used in reservoirs with thick oil columns and good vertical permeability and this process is called gravity drainage. This paper comprises methodology and results of study to evaluate the feasibility of gas injection in gas cap for maintenance of reservoir pressure and to envisage incremental oil gain of a mature offshore carbonate field located in western offshore of India.

Field has already produced more than 30% oil of its initial inplace volume. Water injection was started after 4 years of production and currently field is producing oil with 90% water cut. After one year of initial production phase the field producing GOR rose to two to three fold of its initial value mainly due to contribution of gas from gas cap. Depletion of gas cap gas made significant adverse impact on reservoir pressure and also fast pressure depletion from crestal part had allowed water breakthrough of injection and aquifer water to oil producers. At this stage to reduce the decline rate of wells for maximizing the future recovery without drilling of new wells and also without extension of existing infrastructure, the injection of gas in depleted small gas cap have been studied.

In order to evaluate the feasibility of gas injection in depleted gas cap and its overall impact on oil recovery, three aspects were seen. First the optimized quantity of gas injection and its sensitivity along with the number of gas injectors were decided through reservoir simulation. Therefore, suboptimal oil producers falling within gas cap area are chosen for conversion to Gas injectors. Secondly injection gas requirement for the process will be fulfilled partly through the recycling of produced gas and rest from free gas production from another pay of the same field. Finally it is examined that current existing facility of gas compression will sufficiently cater the additional requirement of gas compression. The process will have additional 10 to 11% contribution in future oil production.

The process of charging gas cap will provide additional support over ongoing water injection leading to a significant additional oil recovery by reducing the oil decline rate.

The effectiveness of secondary and tertiary recovery projects depends heavily on the operator's understanding of the fluid flow characteristics within the reservoir. 3D geo-cellular models and finite element/difference-based simulators may be used to investigate reservoir dynamics, but the approach generally entails a computationally expensive and time-consuming workflow. This paper presents a workflow that integrates rapid analytical method and data-analytics technique to quickly analyze fluid flow and reservoir characteristics for producing near "real-time" results. This fast-track workflow guides reservoir operations including injection fluid allocation, well performance monitoring, surveillance, and optimization, and delivers solutions to the operator using a website application on a cloud-based environment. This web-based system employs a continuity governing equation (Capacitance Resistance Modelling, CRM) to analyze inter-well communication using only injection and production data. The analytic initially matches production history to determine a potential time response between injectors and producers, and simultaneously calculates the connectivity between each pair of wells. Based on the inter-well relationships described by the connectivity network, the workflow facilitates what-if scenarios. This workflow is suitable to study the impact of different injection plans, constraints, and events on production estimation, performance monitoring, anomaly alerts, flood breakthrough, injection fluid supply, and equipment constraints. The system also allows automatic injection re-design based on different number of injection wells to guide injection allocation and drainage volume management for flood optimization solutions. A field located in the Midland basin was analyzed to optimize flood recovery efficiency and apply surveillance assistance. The unit consists of 11 injectors and 22 producers. After optimization, a solution delivering a 30% incremental oil production over an 18-month period was derived. The analysis also predicted several instances of early water breakthrough and high water cut, and subsequent mitigation options. This system couples established waterflood analytics, CRM and modern data-analytics, with a web-based deliverable to provide operators with near "real-time" surveillance and operational optimizations.

Abeeb A. Awotunde, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals Summary This paper evaluates the effectiveness of six dimension-reduction approaches. The approaches considered are the constant-control (Const) approach, the piecewise-constant (PWC) approach, the trigonometric approach, the Bessel-function (Bess) approach, the polynomial approach, and the data-decomposition approach. The approaches differ in their mode of operation, but they all reduce the number of parameters required in well-control optimization problems. Results show that the PWC approach performs better than other approaches on many problems, but yields widely fluctuating well controls over the field-development time frame. The trigonometric approach performed well on all the problems and yields controls that vary smoothly over time. Introduction Field-development optimization has continued to attract interest among researchers and end users of the technology.

There has been much work done on the optimal well placement and control including some investigates on optimizing well types (injector or producer) and/or drilling order. However, to the best of our knowledge, there are no journal articles on the following problem that is sometimes given to reservoir engineering groups: given a potential set of reasonable drilling paths and a drilling budget that is sufficient to drill only a few wells, find the optimum well paths, determine whether a well should be an injector or a producer and the drilling order that optimizes production. In this work, optimizing production means maximizing the net present value (NPV) of production over the life of the reservoir.

Here, this field development optimization problem is solved using the generally acknowledged Genetic Algorithm (GA). Mixed encodings are used to form the chromosomes. A binary encoding for the optimization variables pertaining to well location indices and well types is proposed to effectively handle the large amount of categorical variables while the drilling sequence is parameterized with ordinal numbers. The same selection procedure is used for the binary encoded parameters and the ordinal encoded parameters, however, different mutation and crossover operations are applied. These two sets of variables are optimized both simultaneous and sequentially. In sequential optimization, the first optimization assumes all wells are drilled at time zero and determines the optimal well locations and types, while the second optimization assumes there is only one drilling rig working on site and optimizes the drilling order based on the optimal solutions obtained in the first optimization. Finally, control optimization can be carried out to further improve the NPV of life-cycle production. The impact of well locations and types, drilling order and control settings on the NPV obtained with simultaneous and sequential optimization are compared.

We test the overall GA workflow on two basic examples, a three-dimensional channelized reservoir where the potential well paths are either vertical or horizontal and the Brugge model where only vertical wells are drilled. As GA is a stochastic algorithm, multiple runs for each problem are done in order to evaluate the average performance and robustness of the algorithm. Results indicate that GA gives good solutions in the following sense: (i) the NPV produced is significantly larger than the NPV of any member of a set of initial guesses; (ii) different runs of GA produce a variety of choices of optimal well paths, but the variation in the estimated optimal NPVs is relatively small; (iii) for problems where wells are under rate controls, GA consistently produces NPVs that are higher than the one obtained with the original gradient-based algorithm developed several years ago, albeit at a higher computational cost.

To the best of our knowledge, this paper presents the first work that focuses on the problem of choosing a set of optimal drilling paths and determining which well should be injector and which well should be producer given a large fixed set of possible drilling paths.

Gaither Draw Unit is a heterogeneous and tight formation with an average permeability less than 0.1 mD. After more than 1.7 MMSTB water injection, there was no clear indication or benefit of the injected water from any producer. However, knowing the distribution of the injected water is critical for future well planning and quantifying the efficiency of injection. The objective of this study is to show how the Capacitance-Resistance Model (CRM) was used on this field and validated using other independent methods.

The CRM model describes the connectivity and the degree of fluid storage quantitatively between injectors and producers from production and injection rates. Rooted in material balance, signals from injectors to producers can be captured in the CRM. Using constrained nonlinear multivariable optimization techniques, the connectivity is estimated in the selected portion of the field through signal analysis on injection and production rates. In this tight formation, the whole field is divided into seven regions with one injection well and surrounding producers to conduct CRM analysis. We further use integrated but independent approaches to validate the results from CRM. The validation includes full field modeling and history match and fluid level measurement using echometering technology.

This paper focuses on a real field water flooding project in Gaither Draw Units(GDU). CRM is used to detect reservoir heterogeneity through quantifying communication between injectors and producers, and attains a production match. The fitting results of connectivity through CRM indicate permeability regional heterogeneity, which is consistent with full field modelling. The history matched full field model presents the saturation distribution showing that the majority of injected water mainly saturates the surrounding regions of injectors, and the low transmissibility slows down the pressure dissipation. Overall, the comprehensive interpretation obtained through these three independent methods is consistent, and is very useful in planning infill well drilling and future development plan for the Gaither Draw Units.

This paper shows that it is critical to integrate different sources of data in reservoir management through a field case study. The experience and observations from this asset can be applied to other tight formations being developed with water flooding projects.

Waterflood (WF) is the main drive mechanism of North Kuwait reservoirs. Different development strategies has been adopted to develop a giant carbonate reservoir in the asset. Irregular scheme of WF has been implemented in the last 5 years which made it challenging to properly evaluate the WF performance. This paper presents both numerical and analytical approaches to assess the current performance of the waterflood in this reservoir.

The first method uses actual production and injection data to generate traditional waterflood plots such WOR vs. Np, injection throughput, VRR and other diagnostics.

The second approach uses the numerical model to understand the fluid movements in terms of production and water injection. A high resolution model is used to know about the horizontal producers and injectors WF scheme. Streamline model tool is used to understand how the injectors impact their surrounding producers. Injector's efficiency, allocation factors and reservoir sweep efficiency are calculated using the simulation model.

Both approaches are compared to have a better evaluation of the waterflood.

When the waterflood started, a regular i-9 spot patterns was the way to develop the reservoir. The heterogeneity of the reservoir was observed clearly in the different performance of each pattern. Also, high permeability layer (thief zone) has adversely affected the reservoir performance during WF.

The sharp increase of water cut with very low corresponding recovery factor triggered a paradigm shift in developing this waterflooded reservoir. Injecting in lower layers and producing in upper layers (horizontal wells) was the next stage. This brought a great challenge to assess the performance of this WF scheme. Evaluating such a development strategy remains a achallenge.

This paper deals with the development of our parallel reservoir simulator that is designed for giant reservoir models. It considers oil, water and polymer, and a reservoir can be a conventional reservoir without fractures or a naturally fractured reservoir. For polymer flooding, the simulator can model polymer retention, adsorption, an aqueous phase permeability reduction and viscosity increase, and an inaccessible pore volume. Here fractures are modeled by the dual porosity and dual permeability method. The finite difference (volume) method is applied to discretize the model, upstream techniques are employed to deal with rockfluid properties, and the fully implicit method in time is applied. The linear systems from the Newton method are ill-conditioned and a scalable CPRtype preconditioner is employed to accelerate the solution of these linear systems. The computed results are compared with those from commercial simulators, and they match very well.