Optimizing Water Inj Rate For Waterflooding Field

optimizing water injection rate usefull for study of waterflooding

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Optimizing Water Inj Rate For Waterflooding Field

optimizing water injection rate usefull for study of waterflooding

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Annisa Arisyi

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SPE 157996

Optimizing Water Injection Rates for a Water-flooding field

Feilong Liu, Charlie Guthrie and David Shipley, Chevron Energy Technology Company

This paper was prepared for presentation at the SPE Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition held
in San Antonio, Texas, USA, 8-10 October 2012.
This paper was selected for presentation by an SPE program committee following review of
information contained in an abstract submitted by the author(s). Contents of the paper have not been
reviewed by the Society of Petroleum Engineers and are subject to correction by the author(s). The
material does not necessarily reflect any position of the Society of Petroleum Engineers, its officers, or
members. Electronic reproduction, distribution, or storage of any part of this paper without the written
consent of the Society of Petroleum Engineers is prohibited. Permission to reproduce in print is
restricted to an abstract of not more than 300 words; illustrations may not be copied. The abstract must
contain conspicuous acknowledgment of SPE copyright.

Abstract
Setting proper water injection rates for the injection wells
is a key factor to successfully operate an oil field under water
flooding. The success of such activity could (a) reduce water
cycling at field, section and pattern levels; (b) improve
water/oil ratio (WOR) and areal sweep efficiency; (c)
improve oil production and recovery by directing water
injection to specific zones and areas; and (d) reduce OPEX by
improving water utilization.
Typically, the onsite engineers adjust injection rates using
heuristics. While this does improve performance we feel that
a more systematic approach can be developed which will lead
to further gains. In this paper, we present a systematic
method, using the linear programming, to optimize the water
injection target rates.
In this method, the reservoir is considered to be a system
which can be modeled as a collection of continuous-time
impulse responses that convert injection rates into a
production rate. A very simple two parameter parametric
model, like diffusivity-filter, has been used to quantify the
injector-producer continuous-time impulse responses channel
model and the Extended Kalman Filter has been used to
establish the allocation factors between injectors and
producers in the water-flooded field. Subject to constraints,
including the total available water amount, the maximum and
minimum injection rates, the maximum total production fluid
for a producer and a gauge setting, a linear programming
optimizer has been applied to determine the optimized water
injection rate, based on the established allocation factors.
This method was pilot tested on a Chevron oilfield for 3
months. The decline curve for 6 months and for 2 months of
historical oil production data have been calculated. The 3
month pilot test result indicated that the optimized oil
production matches the historical 6-month decline curve very
well with about 22% less total daily water injection. Also we
saw about 2% incremental production above the historical 2month decline curve (again with about 22% less total daily

water injection). These results suggest that this systematic

method may provide a way to optimize the water injection
target rates.
I. Introduction
Waterflooding is by far the most widely used secondary
recovery method in the oil industry. As the name implies,
waterflooding involves injecting water into an oil reservoir
and driving the oil into the production well. Currently,
waterflooding is responsible for a big portion of world oil
production, and successful waterflood management is hugely
important to the world oil supply.
Waterflood management is a broad topic involving a
range of activities, some of which are performed only once or
twice during the life of the waterflood; others are performed
periodically based on analyses of recurring measurement
data. Among which, setting water injection target rates for the
injection wells is one of the key periodical activities. The
success of such activity could (a) reduce water cycling at
field, section and pattern levels; (b) improve water/oil ratio
(WOR) trend and areal sweep efficiency; (c) improve oil
production and recovery by directing water injection to
specific zones and areas; and (d) reduce OPEX by targeted
water utilization.
Typically, the oil production in a waterflood field is
constrained by a combination of the reservoir condition,
flowing pipeline network and surface facilities. Adjusting the
water injection rates can help control the oil production from
the producer. Hence, how to determine the optimal water
injection target rates, subject to all kind of constraints at the
field, to maximize the oil production is important to the
onsite engineers. However, due to the complex dynamic
interaction between reservoir, injection wells, production
wells and surface facilities, this is not an easy task.
So far, some optimization approaches [2] on adjusting
water injection rates have been proposed, but few of them
have been piloted or applied in an operating field. The onsite
engineers typically set rates using heuristics. What they
regularly do is to look at the production history and bubble
map, and then decide where to inject more water and where
to inject less. These approaches, while helpful, leave room for
further improvement.
To overcome these difficulties, we propose a systematic
method, using the linear programming, to optimize the water
injection target rates in which [3-4]: