Elusive promise of ASP flooding

This post is courtesy of Proven Reserves, one of our information partners.

How do you know when to stop an ASP flood? What is the best end point?

One operator that claims to have started the very first ASP flood in Canada. But now she has proposed to end ASP injection in one of her big floods.

In her application, she conducted a "look-back" to determine the success of the flood. It was a bit disappointing. By reading her application, you can see how well her scheme performed compared to expectations. She discloses the pore volumes of chemical injected through the system and the results. She also makes mention of the economic viability of the flood.

See her lookback from our self-serve web portal.

Why can't ASP flooding deliver results? Is miscible flooding better than ASP?

Her flood only recovered half of what her company had originally forecast. And the applications associated with the flood tell the whole story, from the field's purchase, through its flood, to it's sale to another operator.

There are three advantages to reading about the flood through applications than through SPE papers. First, not every flood is discussed in a republic of science forum. Second, not all the operational details of a failure are disclosed in technical papers. And last, applications are ground-truthed to specific well locations.

This flood's success or failure will not likely be discussed in an SPE forum, or even be covered by an article in a trade magazine. The pool is now sold to another operator who has had no experience with the flood. You won't be able to find the characteristics that led to failure in scientific forums.

When a technical author writes about a flood, his space is limited. His adjudicators are more interested in critiquing what he has written when they should be looking for what he has omitted.

On the contrary, the regulator is always more interested in the issues an applicant has not declared. They want to understand the issues that will affect other ASP installations in the future. They make their queries a matter of public record so they can be found again by future regulators.

If you wish, you can study this ASP installation in depth. All applications are associated with specific locations. You can see each one of the injector UWIs in the application documents. You can look at their injection history and study each pattern at your leisure. Such an opportunity is not available as follow up from an SPE paper -- rarely are actual locations disclosed.

You can search for all ASP installations in seconds in AppIntel using the yahoo-like natural language search. Just type into the KiP box asp flood or polymer flood.

Tags: Polymer, Flood

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