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Improving oil fields recovery through real‐time water flooding optimization
Author(s) -
Marescalco Pamela Alessia Chiara
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
international journal for numerical methods in fluids
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.938
H-Index - 112
eISSN - 1097-0363
pISSN - 0271-2091
DOI - 10.1002/fld.1982
Subject(s) - expediting , flooding (psychology) , reservoir simulation , computer science , workflow , exploit , water flooding , enhanced oil recovery , water injection (oil production) , petroleum engineering , software , simulation , engineering , systems engineering , psychology , computer security , database , psychotherapist , programming language
Increasing oil recovery from reservoirs is a strong urge. One of the most effective ways to get the result is water flooding and that's why its application is nowadays widely used in the petroleum industry. Obviously, water flooding efficiency strongly depends on reservoir properties; this makes simulating a water injection process a priori an extremely important step of the reservoir production strategy. Simulation is commonly done adopting a finite difference (FD) simulation approach. This paper explores a different and complementary approach, represented by streamline‐based simulation, coupled with a tool to optimize water flooding campaigns and to help quick decision making. In the present study, water flooding simulation is performed via two commercial software: an FD and a streamline‐based simulator, to highlight advantages and disadvantages of both simulation techniques in describing a water injection campaign and to exploit the two approaches' uniqueness in parallel. The final goal of iteratively converging to the optimal water flooding scheme, which is the core of the present work, is achieved through a customized Matlab script. The generated automatic procedure shows its effectiveness in improving oil recovery, expediting decision making and saving time and FD simulation runs. A three steps workflow is outlined to get the best water flooding scheme for the examples shown below. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.