Abstract
Traditional waterflooding methods in heavy oil fields can lead to several problems including reductions of swapping efficiency, channeling of injected water, and low values of recovery factor. These problems are often made worse by other critical factors such as lack of real-time data, operational incidents during injection profile calibration, and complexity of interventions in the existing wells. An innovative solution was implemented in a four-zone injector well in a heavy oil field in Colombia consisting of four intelligent electric valves controlled remotely and distributed fiber optic monitoring to calculate injected flow per zone in real-time. This system allowed the operator to increase oil production in the associated producer wells and eliminate rig-less interventions.
The first installation of an All-Electric intelligent completion with distributed fiber optic monitoring was successfully deployed in a complex existing injector well without HSE incidents nor deviations in time and cost. After one year of operation, the system increased production in corresponding producer wells by 62% and saved 30% of operational costs. Additionally, the completion design has improved the injection performance which means that the system requires less injected water to produce the same amount of oil. All these results were possible thanks to the use of a more efficient injection completion and the use of real-time data to make on-time decisions.
The importance of this implementation is that it demonstrated that this type of technology not only solves different challenges of the Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) strategies of mature fields but also brings additional value in terms of oil production, injection performance, and reduction in operational costs. In this way, this application showed that an intelligent completion - usually expensive in terms of initial investment - is financially viable to implement in mature existing wells with limited CAPEX availability.
This paper will present the implementation of an intelligent well completion system that uses permanent distributed fiber optics to monitor water injection in 4 independent zones. The document will also include details regarding the reasons to install this technology in a mature field, well and technology selection, intelligent completion design, and installation. Results will be compared to conventional completion for injector wells that depends on rig-less intervention to measure and regulate injected flow per zone.
Optimization of time and frequency fiber-optic links exploiting bi-directional amplifiers, based on real-time performance measurement