Flood pattern repatterning

How can you keep improving a flood? What's the secret to longevity?

This blog post is brought to you by one of our information partners, Proven Reserves Exploitation Ltd.

One operator discussed his continuing efforts to balance the patterns in his 5-spot turned line-drive flood in an application to the regulator. He shows each pattern of the flood and compares recovery factor to voidage replacement and amount injected.

You can see his plans and mapping by downloading his application within moments -- just click on the button below.

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Repatterning a flood

Call it sloshing water around. But by repatterning a water flood you can significantly add to its sweep and the recovery.

Just by injecting in a different place in the reservoir, you can push water into different areas and push more oil out.

For example, in a classic inverted 5-spot, by shutting in the central injector and beginning injection in two opposing corners of the pattern, you can sweep an entirely new section of the reservoir that was currently unswept.

This change of sweep can provide improved results for decades. We know of pools that started on water flood in the 1950's and are still going strong. They are still improving recovery by repatterning after 65 years!

Pattern balancing

Repatterning is not the only way to improve recovery. You can get great improvements by balancing patterns.

Most floods have been neglected for a while. When an experienced flood engineer reviews the forgotten flood, he will find that much of the injection has been going into only a few of the patterns. Some patterns will be over injected, some will have received little support.

By judging which of the patterns has the best recovery, he can improve the other pattern to perform the same. Switching injection into unsupported patterns usually make great recovery enhancements.

Watching others floods

Reviewing others floods in your formation can give you clues about what type of patterns work well and which are disasters.

The history of floods can often be told by the applications submitted to the regulator.

Applications broadcast the pessimism (or optimism) of an operator. They indicate the operator's short and long term plans.

Applications are an expos  of practical technology use. They show how technology works out in the field. They indicate success and failure of each type of technology. They even offer ways to conduct look-back analysis on technology installations.

The best way to stay on top of oil field technology is to watch applications.

You can get new applications within 20 miles of your operation delivered to your inbox the morning after they are submitted. AppIntel does that.

Cheapest, fastest, best

AppIntel costs less than a quarter of one person's salary. For the same price of a team of six man data-mining department, you could supply all your flood engineers with AppIntel.

AppIntel's search functions are quicker than made-in-house searches. And AppIntel's collection of historic applications is larger than any in-house collection we've seen.

AppIntel has area alerts that allow you to see new applications as soon as they are submitted.

AppIntel doesn't take sick days or vacations and it works on weekends. It doesn't miss applications or documents -- it's contents are triple checked for accuracy. And it adds search by UWI for applications that don't even have a UWI.

Tags: Flood

Granger Low  21 Nov 2016

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