Improving oil fields recovery through real-time water flooding optimization
Increasing oil recovery from reservoirs is a strong urge. One of the most effective ways to get the result is water flooding and that's why its application is nowadays widely used in the petroleum industry. Obviously, water flooding efficiency strongly depends on reservoir properties; this makes simulating a water injection process a priori. an extremely important step of the reservoir production strategy. Simulation is commonly done adopting a finite difference (FD) simulation approach. This paper explores a different and complementary approach, represented by streamline-based simulation. coupled with a tool to optimize water flooding campaigns and to help quick decision making. In the present study, water flooding simulation is performed via two commercial software: an FD and a streamline-based simulator, to highlight advantages and disadvantages of both simulation techniques in describing a water injection campaign and to exploit the two approaches' uniqueness in parallel. The final goal of iteratively converging to the optimal water flooding scheme, which is the core of the present work, is achieved through a Customized Matlab script. The generated automatic procedure shows its effectiveness in improving oil recovery, expediting decision making and saving time and FD simulation runs. A three steps workflow is outlined to get the best water flooding scheme for the examples shown below. Copyright (C) 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
fd simulation water displacement optimization streamline simulation matlab automated routine real-time decision makings quantitative and iterative adjustment of water rates to be injected