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Revisiting Water Injection for the 21st Century --- SPE Forum
31 August—5 September 2008
Cascais, Portugal
Water injection has been used for decades as a mean of improved oil recovery. More recently, stronger environmental awareness has led authority to prohibit the discharge of produced water. In a sense this further complicates water management between its two traditional components – i.e. mechanics and chemistry. The balance between surface treatment of the injected water and the use of higher-pressure pumps has always been a challenge but it is further exacerbated by the need to inject hotter and dirtier fluids. This challenge exists both for existing installations where the room of manoeuvre is limited and the design of optimised future installations.
As a consequence numerous recent studies have been dedicated to the subject of water injection and have shown that the industry’s understanding of the subject was far from perfect.
- For example field measurements of thermal effects around injectors sometime lead to values that are one order of magnitude larger than what theory would predict.
- The evolution of the fracturation pressure with the reservoir pressure around water injectors has been observed but is not understood yet.
- The seal above several large fields has been breached “accidentally” by too aggressive or ill-planned water injection schemes.
- The experience with re-injecting produced water in very weak shallow aquifers is very mixed and one can even question if a robust completion method has been developed for the wells.
- Etc.
From the few examples above one realises that this lack of proper understanding is not new but that it becomes of primary operational importance nowadays when fields are often expected to inject several kinds of water with various amount of dirt and different temperatures over their lifetime. The consequences of this lack of understanding are all the more worrying that they not only concern the economy of operations but also safety and environment.
The goal of the forum is to define clearly what is known and unknown with water injection in the 21st century. More importantly it will try to identify the most promising solutions offered to the industry such as to inject water with maximum safety and economy despite the existing unknowns and the added environmental constraints.
Some of the subjects covered by the forum are outlined below.
- How to complete water injectors in very weak zones?
- How to use temperature to our advantage and not let it play against it?
- How to monitor water injectors?
- How to use 4D seismic?
- How to inject in multi zones?
- How to define the minimum surface treatment required for the injected water?
- How to optimise surface handling on multi-field licences?
- Injection above or below fracturation pressure?
- Vertical wells or horizontal wells?
- Can we define “designer water” and imagine changing the water chemistry to affect reservoir performance?
- What of conformance management with an ever changing injected water?
