Controlling Excessive Water Production Using Induced Formation Damage

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abbas Zeinijahromi ◽  
Pavel Bedrikovetski
2015 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 485
Author(s):  
Abbas Zeinijahromi ◽  
Pavel Bedrikovetski

Excessive water production is a major factor in reduced well productivity. This can result from water channelling from the water table to the well through natural fractures or faults, water breakthrough in high permeability zones, or water coning. The use of foams or gels for controlling water production through high-permeable layers has been tested successfully in several field cases. A large treatment volume, however, is required to block the water influx that generally involves high operational and material costs. This extended abstract proposes a new cost-effective method of creating a low-permeable barrier against the produced water with induced formation damage. The method includes applying induced formation damage to block the water influx without hindering the oil production. This can be achieved by injection of a small slug of fresh water into the water-producing layer. This results in release of in situ fines from the matrix, which can decrease permeability and create a local low-permeable barrier to the producing water. In large-scale approximation, water injection with induced fines migration is analogous to polymer flooding. This analogy is used to model the fresh water with induced formation damage. Sensitivity studies showed that the injection of 0.01 PVI of fresh water resulted in the blockage of the water-producing layer and an incremental recovery by 8% in field case A, with respect to the standard production scenario. The authors found that the incremental gas recovery with induced formation damage was sensitive to reservoir heterogeneity, permeability reduction and slug volume.


2020 ◽  
Vol 143 (8) ◽  
Author(s):  
Munqith Aldhaheri ◽  
Mingzhen Wei ◽  
Ali Alhuraishawy ◽  
Baojun Bai

Abstract Polymer bulk gels have been widely applied to mitigate excessive water production from mature oil fields by correcting the reservoir permeability heterogeneity. This paper reviews water responses, effective times, and economic assessments of injection-well gel treatments based on 61 field projects. Eight parameters were evaluated per the reservoir type using the descriptive analysis, stacked histograms, and scatterplots. Results show that water production generally continues to increase after the treatment for undeveloped conformance problems. Contrarily, it typically decreases after the reactive gel treatments target developed conformance issues. For the developed problems, gel treatments do not always mitigate the water production where the water cut may stabilize or increase by 17% in 22% of instances. In addition, they often do reduce water production but not dramatically to really low levels where the water cut stays above 70% and reduces by only 10% in most cases. Gel treatments are economically appraised based only on the oil production response, and both water responses (injection and production) are not considered in the evaluation. They have a typical payout time of 9.2 months, cost of incremental oil barrel of 2 $/barrel, and effective time of 1.9 years. In addition, they have better water responses and economics in carbonates than in sandstones and in unconsolidated and naturally fractured reservoirs than in matrix-rock formations. The current review strongly warns reservoir engineers that gel treatments are not superior in alleviating the water production and candidates should be nominated based on this fact to achieve favorable economics and avoid treatment failures.


Author(s):  
M.A. Al Hasani ◽  
S.R. Al Khayari ◽  
R.S. Al Maamari ◽  
M.A. Al Wadhahi

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hamzah Kamal ◽  
Prakoso Noke Fajar ◽  
Ghozali Farid ◽  
Aryanto Agus ◽  
Priyantoro Tri Atmojo ◽  
...  

Abstract There is no well operation that is truly non-damaging. Any invasive operation, even production phase itself, may be damaging to well productivity. An interesting case was found in L-Field which is located in South Sumatra, Indonesia. All four wells are predicted to cease to flow after five-year production and artificial lift have to be installed to prevent steep decline in oil production. Unfortunately, all of wells’ productivity index (PI) decreased post well intervention and therefore, couldn’t achieve target. The PI was continuously decreasing during production phase and aggravated the decline in oil production. Remediation action by systematic approach was applied to solve the problem. Early diagnostic revealed some potential causes through evaluation of both production and well treatment data. Laboratory test such as mineralogy analysis, crude composition and water analysis, solubility and compatibility test have been conducted and clarified the root cause that formation damage occurred in multiple mechanism related to incompatibility of the workover fluid and organic deposition. Then, possible well treatments were listed with pros and cons by considering post water production related to the carbonate reservoir properties. Subsequently, chemical matrix injection was ranked based on less possibility of water breakthrough risk. Diesel fuel and de-emulsifier injection was decided as the first treatment in order to remove formation damage caused by organic deposition. The rate was increased temporary with Water Cut (WC) remained at the same level. The subseqeuent effort was to inject low reaction chelating acid and the result showed temporary improvement and the production did achieve significant gain. Finally, the third attempt indicated promising results with the injection of aromatic solvent followed by chelating acid. The well productivity was increased to more than 20 times of the pre treatment levels. The method can be replicated to other affected wells with similar damage mechanism. High vertical permeability over horizontal permeability becomes a real threat in carbonate strong water driver reservoir in L-field. Thus, matrix acidizing treatment has to be carefully applied to prevent unwanted water production. Non-aggressive and slow reaction acid were chosen to prevent face dissolution reaction that leads to water breakthrough.


Author(s):  
Mina Kalateh-Aghamohammadi ◽  
Jafar Qajar ◽  
Feridun Esmaeilzadeh

Excessive water production from hydrocarbon reservoirs is considered as one of major problems, which has numerous economic and environmental consequences. Polymer-gel remediation has been widely used to reduce excessive water production during oil and gas recovery by plugging high permeability zones and improving conformance control. In this paper, we investigate the performance of a HPAM/PEI (water-soluble Hydrolyzed PolyAcrylaMide/PolyEthyleneImine) polymer-gel system for pore space blockage and permeability reduction for conformance control purpose. First, the gel optimum composition, resistance to salt and long life time are determined using bottle tests as a standard method to specify polymer-gel properties. Then the performance and stability of the optimized polymer-gel are tested experimentally using coreflood tests in sandpack core samples. The effects of different parameters such as gel concentration, initial permeability of the cores, and formation water salinity on the final permeability of the cores are examined. Finally, the gel flow-induced local porosity changes are studied in both a sandpack core and a real carbonate sample using grayscale intensity data provided from 3D Computed Tomography (CT) images in pre- and post-treatment states. The results show that the gel system has a good strength at the middle formation water salinity (in the range of typical sea water salinity). In addition, despite a higher performance in high permeability cores, the gel resistance to degradation in such porous media is reduced. The CT images reveal that the initial porosity distribution has a great influence on the performance of the gel to block the pore space.


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