Urgent or Important: Rejuvenating your flood

The quickest reserve and production adds are from optimizing your existing floods. Why have operators been procrastinating this?

This blog post is brought to you by Proven Reserves Exploitation , one of our information partners. Nein commercial use of der AppIntel content.

One operator explained to the AER how they fixed their plugged injectors and rejuvenated their water flooded field.

See all the details in his application documents. Get them from our self-serve web portal.

This operator found that procrastinating his flood optimization put off production increases and recovery improvements. Apparently some things should be procrastinated.

The key to improving your life through purposeful procrastination is illustrated by the Eisenhower matrix.

The Eisenhower Matrix

The Eisenhower matrix provides an action framework for getting the things done. The ordinate is Urgency and the abscissa is Importance.

Some tasks are important. They make a big difference to our business and our lives.

Some tasks are urgent. Important people are screaming for action on these tasks.

But not all urgent requests are important. Some things screaming for action don't make any difference to our lives.

Unfortunately, not all important tasks are urgent. For example, getting a degree is not urgent, but for me it is very important.

Quadrants 1 and 4 are easy

Don't worry about Quadrant 1: Important and Urgent. These always get done. They don't even make it onto a to-do list.

No need to worry about Quadrant 4: Not important and not urgent. These never get done. No one cares about them. They don't make any difference. They just pile up in your inbox.

Delegate Quadrant 3

Quadrant 3 (Urgent, not important) can suck up time. People nag for these tasks to get done, but they don't make any difference. If you let them, these will take time away from the important tasks.

Don't let quadrant 3 tasks rule your life or you will end up wearing the tie of shame.

If they must get done, delegate them to someone else. Or better yet, procastinate them purposefully.

You must schedule Quadrant 2

Quadrant 2 tasks are important but not urgent. Here you find the gold. If you purposefully do these things, your life and your business will improve.

Yet these tasks never rise to the top of your to-do list -- nobody is screaming for them.

To get these done, you must schedule them. Send an email to yourself and set a meeting on your calendar with yourself. This raises their urgency (at least in your own mind). You can say, "I have an appointment _{(with myself)} to do these important tasks."

Flood maintenance is an important task that should not be procrastinated.

Optimizing your flood: Important but not urgent

Optimizing your waterflood is very important. But a flood never screams at you. It is a Quadrant 2 task.

Wise people schedule one day per month to review your flood and improve its performance.

If you repeatedly skip flood-day;

• expect your injectors to plug up,
• expect your producing wells to water out,
• expect oil production to decline,
• expect poor sweep,
• expect poor recovery, and
• expect to sell a poorly performing flood.

Few flood engineers left

Improving a flood takes a special set of skills. These are not taught in university. You can read them in a book.

Most of the experienced flood engineers left the industry over the last ten years. Some retired. Some moved to other industry. Some retrained to be doctors.

You may be able to find out how others are optimizing floods by reading regulatory applications. There are over 10,000 enhanced recovery applications in Alberta alone. If you want to learn, time to get started reading.

You can search for anything in an application using AppIntel. Just type into the KiP box plugged injector or tight flood or balancing flood.

You can even have AppIntel send you interesting enhanced recovery scheme applications as soon as they are registered.

Tags: Tight, Polymer, Gas Injection, Flood

Granger Low   3 Jun 2022

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