Candidate Acquisition of Downhole Water Sink Potential (CadWasp) -Initial Development of an Expert System for Identifying Candidates for Enhanced Recovery Technologies

Abstract

This paper overviews research efforts, to date, toward an expert system and well candidate selection program model, named Candidate Acquisition of Downhole Water Sink Potential or CadWasp. The final program will identify bypassed oil reserves that are accessible through re-entering inactive and orphaned wells with Downhole Water Sink (DWS) installations and prioritize these reserves according to their success potential. DWS uses two completions, one for the water column and one for the oil column to control water coning. The use of DWS technology is the primary target for this system, but the system is built to enable other types of well stimulations/enhancements to be able to target candidates as well.CadWasp has been designed to identify "most likely to succeed" candidates, not all candidates by searching a massive database from large operational area containing incomplete data. It is presently coupled with the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources Strategic Online Natural Resources Information System (SONRIS) that provided sufficient information for the initial prioritization of candidates by regions, parishes, fields, reservoirs and wells.CadWasp is written in Java in order to allow its running on a wide number of platforms. To avoid problems with installing and configuring a database management system (DBMS) such as Microsoft Access or mySQL, data is stored locally on the user's hard disk in specially formatted files for use in CadWasp.