Enhanced oil recovery (EOR) operations are designed to follow deterministic and detailed procedures, with planned actions for the people executing them and expected reactions from the system (reservoir) to which operations are being applied. However, a number of hurdles need to be overcome to reach a successful action/reaction, problem-free status in EOR operations. One challenge is that success depends on insightful subsurface knowledge. Nevertheless, as is well-known to people in the oil industry, information about key reservoir properties is scarce and limited to point measurements inside the wells and nondestructive remote data at much lower resolution. Thus, there is great uncertainty in the process of describing the reservoir, and EOR operations must be planned, developed, and managed in this uncertain environment. To reduce uncertainty, the strategy should be to focus at first on a robust EOR screening and design process, gathering as much reservoir data as possible. In the second stage, technically sound pilot studies can increase knowledge and reduce operating risk.
Time and resources spent on those two topics have provided oil operators with improved EOR-management techniques, despite the underlying reservoir uncertainties, with fewer surprises and less stress and ambiguity. Like a gold-medal team in a synchronized swimming event, despite participants being outside their natural and well-known environments, training and teamwork are responsible for a unique, precise, and quite deterministic result.
The papers featured this month will give you only a few examples of the vast amount of high-quality material that was published last year and will illustrate how EOR operations, though challenging, can be tackled on the basis of technological advances in data acquisition and careful analysis and interpretation of reservoir data during screening and pilot-study phases. I hope you will enjoy the reading and will search for additional papers in the OnePetro online library.
This Month's Technical Papers
Foam-EOR Pilot: Mature Volatile-Oil Reservoir Under Miscible-Gas Injection
Implementation Challenges: DTS Injection Profiles in the Belridge Field, California
Real-Time Optimization of SAGD Operations
Albacora Subsea Raw-Water Injection
Recommended Additional Reading
SPE 164048 Novel Scale Remediation for Steam-Assisted-Gravity-Drainage Operations by Timothy Cheung, Shell Canada, et al.
SPE 155123 Industrial Experience in Seawater Desulfination by Pierre Pedenaud, Total, et al.
SPE 157996 Optimizing Water-Injection Rates for a Waterflooding Field by Feilong Liu, Chevron Energy Technology Company, et al.
SPE 159620 A New Approach To Deliver Highly Concentrated Surfactants for Chemical Enhanced Oil Recovery by Julian Barnes, Shell Global Solutions
| Luciane Bonet-Cunha, SPE, is reservoir engineering manager for Petrobras America in Houston. She has 28 years of experience in applied research and development related to reservoir engineering in exploration and exploitation projects in Brazil, Canada, and the US Gulf of Mexico. A former associate professor of petroleum engineering at the University of Alberta, Canada, Bonet-Cunha has served on several SPE committees. Her employment history also includes 16 years with Petrobras, Brazil. Bonet-Cunha holds a PhD degree in petroleum engineering from The University of Tulsa and currently serves as an editor for SPE Reservoir Evaluation & Engineering and serves on the JPT Editorial Committee. |
