GUPCO'S Experience in Treating Gulf of Suez Seawater for Waterflooding the El Morgan Oil Field
Authors: El-Hattab Mohammed I. 
Published: December 2007

Pressure maintenance by waterflooding in some reservoirs may be considered essential for satisfactory oil recovery. The main objective of waterflooding is to place water into a rock formation at both the desired rate and pressure with minimal expense and trouble. This objective, however, cannot be achieved unless this water has certain characteristics. The water, therefore, should be treated and conditioned before injection. This treatment should solve problems associated with the individual injection waters, including suspended matter. corrosivity of water scale deposition, and microbiological fouling and corrosion.

Gulf of Suez Petroleum Co. (GUPCO) is waterflooding two fields, El Morgan and July, with Gulf of Suez (GOS) water. The paper addresses the treatment phases adopted to improve seawater quality before injection, and to control problems associated with untreated seawater. Also discussed are GUPCO'S experience in seawaterfloods, problems encountered, and corrective actions taken to overcome these problems. The chemical treatment programs adopted are presented along with final conclusions and recommendations that can be applied to similar floods in Egypt with GOS.

Introduction

Any treatment should be designed to solve the problems associated with individual injection waters. These problems involve suspended matters in the water, corrosivity. scale deposition, and microbiological fouling and corrosion. Additional problems that may result from water injection are injection well plugging and scale deposition both downhole in the oil producers and at surface in production equipment because of incompatible water mixing.

Historically, in injection projects subsurface and/or makeup waters, river waters, and lake waters have been used. Seawater also has been used in many waterfloods. Pacific Ocean water, North Sea water, and Gulf of Mexico water have been used in similar waterflooding projects. ADMA has one seawater injection project in Abu Dhabi making use of Arabian Gulf water, which also is used in a large ARAMCO water injection project in Saudi Arabia and in Dubai as well.

GUPCO has two injection projects for the El Morgan and July fields involving use of Gulf of Suez water. There is no published information on the characteristics of GOS water the treatment requirement for injection, or GUPCO'S operational experience with these projects. The main purpose of this paper is to introduce some information relative to GUPCO'S seawater injection system for the El Morgan field.

Water Injection and Formation Plugging

The quality of an injection water depends on its properties-e.g., suspended matter (turbidity caused by organisms and particulates), corrosivity in the system handling this water, and the tendency of the water to deposit scale. Hence the net water quality is dependent on all these properties simultaneously and is primarily connected with its capability to plug the formation rocks. Jones discussed rock plugging by solids. Generally, the tendency of an injection well to become plugged is dependent on the characteristics of both the formation and the injection water. The matrix of any rock is a fine filter for solids in the injection water (free or suspended). This is generally true in spite of differences in pore sizes that formation porous rocks may have. Consequently, the formation face of the water injection well is a good filter for the suspended solids present in the injection water and can become clogged.

JPT

P. 1449.