Korolev Large Scale Pilot (KLSP) Project is a part of the Improved Oil Recovery (IOR) project intended to gather operational and subsurface learnings to improve understanding of Korolev reservoir response to water injection and incremental waterflood recovery potential. The main objective of this paper is to share facilities design, waterflooding monitoring techniques and operational lessons learned and best practices.
The process for the waterflooding evaluation includes nested pilot projects which provide key information to make the decision whether to stop or proceed with the project using the data as input for well completions and facility designs. The large-scale pilot equipment set consists of 3 water source wells, a pumping station and 2 water injection wells.
One of the main goals of KLSP is to allow surveillance data gathering to evaluate the pilot efficiency, to improve potential full field waterflood design, and to decrease the uncertainty of existing hydrodynamic models for the optimization of asset development strategies in the future.
The existing surveillance plan includes fall-off tests at the injection wells, water source well sampling for water compositional analysis, injection logging tests for the estimation of zonal injection allocation, pulse test program between production and injection wells for the reservoir connectivity assessment, step-rate tests for injectivity evaluation and continuous reservoir pressure trend monitoring via permanent/temporary pressure gauges installed at Korolev production wells.
A comprehensive water breakthrough monitoring strategy has been put in place, which includes tracer injection, water wash index analysis, robust wellhead sampling plan and daily offset production well water-cut measurements through the multiphase flowmeter.
An early water breakthrough response plan has been developed for the cases of a sudden increase in water-cuts at the offset wells. The plan accounts for both KLSP's needs for data collection and the plant water production constraints.
This paper gives an overview of the KLSP IOR project's operations challenges, reservoir uncertainties and surveillance operations, while also sharing facilities design, waterflooding monitoring techniques and overall design approach of the pilot waterflooding in Korolev field.
