A Systematic Design Approach for Bulk Gel Treatments Based on Average Gel Volume-Concentration Ratio

Controlling excessive water production in mature oil fields has always been one major objective of the oil and gas industry. This objective calls for planning of more effective water-control treatments with optimized designs to obtain more attractive outcomes. Unfortunately, planning such treatments still represents a dilemma for conformance experts due to the lack of systematic design tools in the industry. This paper proposes and makes available a new design approach for bulk gel treatments by grouping designs of 62 worldwide field projects (1985-2018) according to gel volume-concentration ratio (VCR). After compiling them from SPE papers, the average gel volumes and polymer concentrations in the field projects were used to evaluate the gel VCR. Distributions of field projects were examined according to the gel VCR and the formation type using stacked histograms. A comprehensive investigation was performed to indicate the grouping criterion and design types of gel treatments. Based on mean-per-group strategy, the average VCR was estimated for each channeling and formation type to build a three-parameter design approach. Two approximations for the average polymer concentration and two correlations for minimum and maximum designs and were identified and included in the approach. The study shows that the gel VCR is a superior design criterion for in-situ bulk gel treatments. Field applications tend to aggregate in three project groups of clear separating VCR cut-offs (<1, 1-3, >3 bbl/ppm). The channeling type is the dividing or distributing criterion of the gel projects among the three project groups. We identified that VCRs<1 bbl/ppm are used to treat conformance problems that exhibit pipe-like channeling usually presented in unconsolidated and fractured formations with very long injection time (design type I). For fracture-channeling problems frequently presented in naturally or hydraulically-fractured formations, VCRs of 1-3 bbl/ppm are used (design type II). Large gel treatments with VCR>3 bbl/ppm are performed to address matrix-channeling often shown in matrix-rock formations and fracture networks (design type III). Results show that the VCR approach reasonably predicts the gel volume and the polymer concentration in training (R2 of 0.93 and 0.67) and validation (AAPE <22%) samples. Besides its novelty, the new approach is systematic, practical, and accurate, and will facilitate the optimization of the gel treatments to improve their performances and success rate.