Determination of Injection Interval and Profile from Temperature and Pressure Surveys on a Gas Injection Well

Publication Rights Reserved This paper is to be presented at the Rocky Mountain Regional Meeting of the Society of Petroleum Engineers of AIME, to be held in Denver, Colo., May 23–24, 1966, and is considered the property of the Society of Petroleum Engineers. Permission to publish is hereby restricted to an abstract of not more than 300 words, with no illustrations, unless the paper is specifically released to the press by the Editor of the Journal of petroleum Technology or the Executive Secretary. Such abstract should contain conspicuous acknowledgment of where and by whom the paper is presented. Publication elsewhere after publication in Journal of Petroleum Technology or Society of Petroleum Engineers journal is granted on request, providing proper credit is given that publication and the original presentation of the paper. Discussion of this paper is invited. Three copies of any discussion should be sent to the Society of Petroleum Engineers office. Such discussion may be presented at the above meeting and, with the paper, may be considered for publication in one of the two SPE magazines. The use of temperature surveys for locating the actual intervals of injection and the injection profile within these intervals in a gas injection well has not been widely recognized. This paper presents the results of a number of rather comprehensive surveys for these purposes. Pressure surveys were used primarily as back-up data for the temperature surveys. A temperature bomb of the type normally located in the field, and owned by the operating company, was found to be satisfactory. Continuous temperature surveys, obtained by synchronizing depth measurements with time, using a stop-watch, were much faster than bench-type surveys and produced much better detail. It was found that injecting temperature surveys may be successfully used to locate the actual injection interval in a gas injection well. Shut-in temperature surveys, in conjunction with the injecting surveys may be used to calculate the injection profile, i.e., per cent of total injection/ft vs depth. Introduction In May, 1964, Marathon Oil Co. became interested in determining the actual injection interval of a gas injection well. After eight months of operations, none of the injected gas had appeared in any of the producing wells. Consequently, there was no way of knowing where the injected gas was migrating to in the reservoir. Consideration was given to perforating one or more of the producing wells to if injected gas existed behind the casing. Since a 122-ft open-hole section existed in the injection well, it was necessary to know the interval actually taking gas in order to locate the intervals to perforate in the producing wells. After reviewing the various techniques used or being considered by the industry, it was decided to try to locate the injection interval with temperature surveys. Pressure surveys for fluid level determination were to supplement this procedure. It was also hoped that an estimate of the gas injection profile, or per cent injection rate vs depth, might be obtained from the temperature surveys. A gas injection profile would provide information on the vertical sweep efficiency of the reservoir. Vertical sweep efficiency has been considered to be a possible cause of low oil recovery from this particular reservoir.