A Retrospective Look at a Profitable Water Flood

The history of Flood 12, a former intensive air-gas repressuring project, is discussed. The sand body is described and core graphs are given showing an upper and lower section of the Bartlesville sand body. The conventional five-spot waterflood development and well completions in these sand sections are outlined. The plant design and distributing systems are reviewed. A comparison is made between intermittent and continuous flowing for producing wells with continuous flowing yielding the better results. The waterflood recovery is determined to be above average for similar nearby projects. Since there seems to be still significant quantities of recoverable oil remaining, especially in the upper sand, plans are proceeding to exploit this reserve. Introduction The two leases which make up the area known as Flood 12 are the Riverland and the Scudder, located in the Alluwe pool of Nowata County, Okla. (Fig. 1). Their earlier history has been discussed before. The Riverland is the northernmost 80-acre tract and was formed by unitizing three leases. The Scudder lease, on the south, is also an 80-acre lease. Although the entire 160 acres has been flooded from a single water plant, the oil production of the two tracts has been run from separate tank batteries. Since there has been some difference in the primary history of the two tracts, and also some difference in their development for water flooding, they will be discussed separately. Both of these tracts were purchased from an independent operator in 1951 as a small part of a larger purchase. Sinclair obtained control of operations Aug. 1, 1951. At that time, the development of the flood was largely completed, the plant was constructed and over 3 million bbl of water had been injected. Except for the change in operating practices instituted by Sinclair and the drilling of additional wells to exploit the sand body more intensively, Flood 12 has been operated from the development program instituted by the former owner. Because it was a part of a large purchase, no actual cash value was assigned to Flood 12 as such. However, the estimated worth attributed to Flood 12 at date of purchase has been more than justified by its performance since then.