Dear All,
I am currently working with a mature oil field with an average water cut reach 99.5%. The field was developed in the 1970s located onshore with more than 500 wells drilled and 300 active wells.
The reservoir has a very strong bottom water drive aquifer. The reservoir pressure only drops 100-200 psi for 50 years timeframe. Until today, we don't have any injector wells. Thus, the life stage of the reservoir is in the primary recovery state. The recovery factor until today reaches 45% with the "Living with water" production strategy.
Therefore, my question are:
1. How to improve oil production since water injection or gas injection is not an option?
2. Can routine huff and puff surfactant injections for some selected pattern be performed to mimic surfactant/EOR continuous injection?
Thank you in advanced
I think these papers could help you;
They're available on the ResearchGate Server for download.
A few leads building upon your short description, trying to exhaustive.
1. Changing the sweep pattern. Likely not what you are after because it is what has probably been extensively tried and executed we can surmise as best as possible. We would need more details to identify best leads.
2. Changing the sweeping fluid. It can be done by injecting downdip gas (for residual oil swelling, possibly viscosity reduction), surfactant, emulsioner and / or fresher water. The killing factor likely is the cost of new wells. Alternatively, do the same locally around producers along an Huff'n Puff scheme, as you mentionned. In this particular cas, efficiency will likely be low.
3. Changing the sweep P/T conditions. The strong aquifer likely prevents playing with pressure. Temperature is the remaining factor. I am not aware of any convincing window where it works (and had a look at that). It could be looked at from a local producer centric viewpoint or downdip viewpoint with same low efficiency / high costs problematics (on top of other challenges related to heating technologies).
Remarks:
a) You can tackle this from a macro-scale viewpoint (as laid out above) or a micro-scale viewpoint (by doing things like looking for any hysteretic effect in compressibility, relative permeability / wettability, ...) first, evaluating recovery gains and conditions and looking after at how to create macro conditions such as to favor recovery increase. Both works, best approach is dependent upon available data and your skillset / preferences.
b) As you might observe I do not rule out gas or water injection out of hand because you are not giving us a basis to do so. It might be (likely is) the case due to well costs but recovery is all about costs and no cost data is given.
1. Diagnose the reason of water cuts and perform WSOs for candidate wells if any
2. Keep producing till economic limit and facility capacity
3. Think about on- off cyclic production in case of wells suffering from coning or rate sensitivity
4. Track the movement of water front of the aquifer
Generic ideas only... actual recommendations after full data on performance is evaluated.
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