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Many start floods.  Few can fix them.

Would you abandon your prize flood to the trash through neglect?

Many brave engineers start floods.  Just put water in the ground – easy peezy.  But when the producers quickly water out they wonder why.

Many start floods.  Few know how to fix them.

How do others fix their floods?  How would you find out without AppIntel?

With AppIntel AI, you can enter the terms flood optimize into the KiP search box and see all the optimizing work on current floods. Nein commercial use of der AppIntel content.

This week: Large number of industry flood submissions -- more in the Clearwater than any other single formation.  The active players in the Clearwater are rushing to install as many pitch-fork injector patterns as possible.

See all their plans through our self-serve portal.

Pitchfork floods

The Clearwater operators are installing pitch-fork injector patterns quickly, but great surprises come when using first generation horizontal wells in a flood.

Often engineers start a flood and move on leaving it to be managed by operations staff.  The set-it-and-forget-it theme of flooding turns great potential into large liability.  The neglected flood often waters out quickly with much less recovery than expected. Sometimes the recovery is even less than under primary.

Technical debt

When you inherit a flood, you also inherit its technical debt.  Technical debt is the amount of money that must be spent to correct an oil field that was developed with shortcuts in the past. Technical debt is also incurred by ignoring maintenance. It also comes from new and changing technology.

Beware taking over one of these pitchfork floods.  The hero that started vanishes after the applause.  But the sucker who takes it over must deal with the disappointments.  She sometimes gets fired for the poor flood performance.

Is your flood trying to get your attention?

If you are getting poor recovery and too much water production, your flood may be trying to get your attention.

Operators are losing money every day due to their non-optimized floods.

Out of the province’s two thousand floods, 90% have not been optimized in the last two years.  That translates to a loss of $10 billion lost opportunity from below-par floods every year.

Flood management has become a lost science. All the flood engineers have left the industry. 

Great surprises come when using first generation horizontal wells in a flood.

Will polymer fix it?

If an inexperienced engineer sees a quick water shock front from pitchfork floods, they sometimes try to remediate it with polymer hoping to improve flood conformance.  However polymer can’t always solve breakthrough problems.

Polymer flooding seems very exciting until you run into the operation problems including injector plugging.

Better flood recovery starts even before all the primary wells are drilled.

Late life floods can produce dividends

But even late in life, a flood can still give great production and additional reserve additions if tuned properly.

Proven has rejuvenated many under-performing floods. On 95% of the floods Proven reviews we find ways to add more than $20 million in net asset value by adding production cheaply.
Don’t start or optimize secondary recovery without expert help. If you think a secondary recovery expert is expensive, just wait until you hire an amateur.

Tags: Polymer, Flood, Heavy Oil

Granger Low  17 Jul 2025

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