RESERVOIR SIMULATION IN THE MEREENIE FIELD

1986 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 428
Author(s):  
B.F. Towler

The Mereenie Field in the Amadeus Basin was discovered in 1964 and contains an estimated 240 million barrels of oil and 480 billion (USA) cubic feet of gas in three formations. The field commenced production at 1500 barrels of oil per day from seven wells in September 1984. The structure is large and elongated and the oil in the permeable sands appears as a rim round the structure. This paper describes a reservoir simulation study initiated to evaluate the recovery of oil from wells sited on the north and south flanks of the anticline where the steep dips cause the oil rim to become very narrow.Ten studies were made on a 21 × 15 cell pattern model using a three phase semi-implicit black oil reservoir simulator. The ten runs compared oil recovery and gas/oil ratio as a function of formation dip, bottom hole flowing pressure, gas injection and water injection. These showed that the flank wells could be expected to recover 300 000 stock tank barrels of oil from primary and secondary operations which represents about 25 per cent of the oil in place for wells sited on half mile spacings. However the wells will experience high gas/oil ratios and a steep decline in oil rate.

2009 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 453
Author(s):  
Pavel Bedrikovetsky ◽  
Mohammad Afiq ab Wahab ◽  
Gladys Chang ◽  
Antonio Luiz Serra de Souza ◽  
Claudio Alves Furtado

Injectivity formation damage with water-flooding using sea/produced water has been widely reported in the North Sea, the Gulf of Mexico and the Campos Basin in Brazil. The damage is due to the capture of solid/liquid particles by the rock with consequent permeability decline; it is also due to the formation of a low permeable external filter cake. Yet, moderate injectivity decline is not too damaging with long horizontal injectors where the initial injectivity is high. In this case, injection of raw or poorly treated water would save money on water treatment, which is not only cumbersome but also an expensive procedure in offshore projects. In this paper we investigate the effects of injected water quality on waterflooding using horizontal wells. It was found that induced injectivity damage results in increased sweep efficiency. The explanation of the phenomenon is as follows: injectivity rate is distributed along a horizontal well non-uniformly; water advances faster from higher rate intervals resulting in early breakthrough; the retained particles plug mostly the high permeability channels and homogenise the injectivity profile along the well. An analytical model for injectivity decline accounting for particle capture and a low permeable external filter cake formation has been implemented into the Eclipse 100 reservoir simulator. It is shown that sweep efficiency in a heterogeneous formation can increase by up to 5% after one pore volume injected, compared to clean water injection.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Muhammad Zakwan Mohd Sahak ◽  
Eugene Castillano ◽  
Tengku Amansyah Tuan Mat ◽  
Maung Maung Myo Thant

Abstract For mature fields, water injection is one of the widely deployed techniques to ensure continuous oil recovery from the reservoir by maintaining the reservoir pressure, oil rim and pushing the oil from injection to production wells. Thus, it is critical to ensure a continuous and reliable operation of water injection to have consistent and sustainable rate. This paper demonstrates the new approach, utilizing automation and digital technology providing operational improvement and reduction in unplanned production deferment (UPD). One of the methods to effectively manage the water injection operation is via automation of injection process, especially since most of the water injection facilities still rely heavily on manual operation. First, a discussion on typical water injection technique is discussed. Challenges and sub-optimal operation of water injection processes within the company and industry are analysed. Then, the designing of a fully automated water injection system, such as equipment availability and constraints in matching and responding to well injection requirement are demonstrated. While an immediate adoption of process automation to mature assets may be faced with challenges such as system readiness, hardware availability, capital investment and mindset change, a step-by-step approach such as guided operation and semi-auto operation is explored as preparation prior to a full automation roll-out. With the shift from manual operation reliance to automation, the response time to process changes is improved leading to reduction in near-miss and trip cases, and minimum unplanned deferment.


2009 ◽  
Vol 12 (05) ◽  
pp. 671-682 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul J. van den Hoek ◽  
Rashid A. Al-Masfry ◽  
Dirk Zwarts ◽  
Jan-Dirk Jansen ◽  
Bernhard Hustedt ◽  
...  

Summary It is well established within the industry that water injection mostly takes place under induced fracturing conditions. Particularly in low-mobility reservoirs, large fractures may be induced during the field life. This paper presents a new modeling strategy that combines fluid flow and fracture growth (fully coupled) within the framework of an existing "standard" reservoir simulator. We demonstrate the coupled simulator by applications to repeated five-spot pattern flood models, addressing various aspects that often play an important role in waterfloods: shortcut of injector and producer, fracture containment to the reservoir layer, and areal and vertical reservoir sweep. We also demonstrate how induced fracture dimensions (length, height) can be very sensitive to typical reservoir engineering parameters, such as fluid mobility, mobility ratio, 3D saturation distribution (in particular, shockfront position), 3D temperature distribution, positions of wells (producers, injectors), and geological details (e.g., layering and faulting). In particular, it is shown that lower overall (time-dependent) reservoir transmissibility will result in larger induced fractures. Finally, it is demonstrated how induced fractures can be taken into account to determine an optimum life-cycle injection rate strategy. The results presented in this paper are expected to also apply to (part of) enhanced-oil-recovery operations (e.g., polymer flooding).


2018 ◽  
Vol 140 (7) ◽  
Author(s):  
Aifen Li ◽  
Xiaoxia Ren ◽  
Shuaishi Fu ◽  
Jiao Lv ◽  
Xuguang Li ◽  
...  

The application of water flooding is not successful for the development of low permeability reservoirs due to the fine pore sizes and the difficulty of water injection operation. CO2 can dissolve readily in crude oil and highly improve the mobility of crude oil, which makes CO2 flooding an effective way to the development of the ultralow-permeability reservoirs. The regularities of various CO2 displacement methods were studied via experiments implemented on cores from Chang 8 Formation of Honghe Oilfield. The results show that CO2 miscible displacement has the minimum displacement differential pressure and the maximum oil recovery; CO2-alternating-water miscible flooding has lower oil recovery, higher drive pressure, and relatively lower gas-oil ratio; water flooding has the minimum oil recovery and the maximum driving pressure. A large amount of oil still can be produced under a high gas-oil ratio condition through CO2 displacement method. This fact proves that the increase of gas-oil ratio is caused by the production of dissolved CO2 in oil rather than the free gas breakthrough. At the initial stage of CO2 injection, CO2 does not improve the oil recovery immediately. As the injection continues, the oil recovery can be improved rapidly. This phenomenon suggests that when CO2 displacement is performed at high water cut period, the water cut does not decrease immediately and will remain high for a period of time, then a rapid decline of water cut and increase of oil production can be observed.


2003 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 395-413 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Gambaro ◽  
M. Currie

AbstractThe Balmoral Oilfield is a mature asset in its final phase of production. Associated with the Balmoral development have been the less significant Glamis and Stirling Fields. Each field is different from the perspective of geology and many other issues. Balmoral is a typical Paleocene oilfield with good water drive from a large regional aquifer. Interestingly this was not recognized at the start of the development when water injection facilities were commissioned. Glamis is a smaller field of Late Jurassic age containing somewhat lighter oil than Balmoral. Water injection has been necessary to maximize recovery in this field. Stirling is one of the few fields in the North Sea to produce commercially from the naturally fractured Devonian Sandstone. This field is developed by a single horizontal well.Balmoral oil recovery has significantly exceeded original expectations, whilst Glamis and Stirling have produced as much as expected.


Author(s):  
Oluwasanmi Olabode ◽  
Sunday Isehunwa ◽  
Oyinkepreye Orodu ◽  
Daniel Ake

AbstractThin oil rim reservoirs are predominantly those with pay thickness of less than 100 ft. Oil production challenges arise due to the nature of the gas cap and aquifer in such reservoirs and well placement with respect to the fluid contacts. Case studies of oil rim reservoir and operational properties from the Niger-Delta region are used to build classic synthetic oil rim models with different reservoir parameters using a design of experiment. The black oil simulation model of the ECLIPSE software is activated with additional reservoir properties and subsequently initialized to estimate initial oil and gas in place. To optimize hydrocarbon production, 2 horizontal wells are initiated, each to concurrently produce oil and gas. Well placements of (0.5 ft., 0.25 ft. and 0.75 ft.) are made with respect to the pay thickness and then to the fluid contacts. The results show that for oil rim with bigger aquifers, an oil recovery of 8.3% is expected when horizontal wells are placed at 0.75 ft. of the pay thickness away from the gas oil contact, 8.1% oil recovery in oil rims with larger gas caps with completions at 0.75 ft. of the pay zone from the gas oil contacts, 6% oil recovery with relatively small gas caps and aquifer and 9.3% from oil rims with large gas caps and aquifers, with completions at mid-stream of the pay zone.


2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
C.. Temizel ◽  
S.. Purwar ◽  
A.. Agarwal ◽  
A.. Abdullayev ◽  
K.. Urrutia ◽  
...  

Abstract Water alternating gas (WAG) injection has been widely used for the last 50 years throughout the world. The typical improved oil recovery (IOR) potential for WAG injection compared with water injection is 5 to 10%. It was originally intended to improve sweep efficiency during gas flooding, with intermittent slugs of water and gas designed to follow the same route through the reservoir. Mechanisms in WAG injection include microscopic effects, particularly in cases where three-phase flow and hysteresis are important for the IOR effect. Injection of gas usually aids an ongoing waterflood, and finding technical and commercial methods to reduce gas costs would be useful. Water injection alone tends to sweep the lower parts of a reservoir, while gas injected alone sweeps more of the upper parts of a reservoir because of gravitational forces. Gas represents a large fraction of the total cost, making WAG injection an expensive method. Thus, optimizing WAG injection is not only crucial in terms of recovery but also economics, especially where gas is expensive and/or limited. In this study, the significance of key components in a WAG injection process on SPE's 5th Comparative Solution Project (CSP) is presented that models the WAG process through a pseudo-miscible formulation by means of coupling a full-physics reservoir simulator with commercial optimization and uncertainty software. The results are analyzed and presented in a comparative manner by means of tornado charts showing the significance of each decision and uncertainty variable.


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