Recent Advances in Fiber Optic Technology for In-Well Production and Injection Profiling

Abstract

In the past decade, Fiber-Optic (FO) based sensing has opened up opportunities for in-well reservoir surveillance in the oil and gas industry. Distributed Temperature Sensing (DTS) has been used in applications such as steam front monitoring in thermal development projects and injection conformance monitoring in waterflood development projects using warmback analysis and FO-based pressure gauges are deployed commonly. In recent years significant progress has also been made to mature other, new FO-based surveillance methods such as the application of Distributed Strain Sensing (DSS) for monitoring reservoir compaction and well deformation, multidrop Distributed Pressure Sensing (DPS) for fluid level determination, and Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) for geophysical and production/injection profiling. For the latter application, numerous field surveys were conducted to develop evaluation algorithms to convert the DAS noise recordings into flow rates from individual zones.In this paper we present an overview of recent advances in FO-based methods such as DAS, DTS, and DSS for the application of production and injection surveillance. From field examples acquired by Shell and its affiliates it is clear that FO-based flow monitoring provides a powerful addition to the standard surveillance toolkit and in some cases is even the preferred way of surveillance because of its unique advantages.

Fiber-Optic Chemical Sensors and Biosensors (2015–2019)

“…Oils. Detecting oils using fiber optic technology finds applications in examining oil quality, in oil field discovery and exploration, 270 in monitoring oil spilling on the sea or oil leakage along pipelines, and in wastewater monitoring. The distributed optical sensing and downhole optical spectroscopy used for oil and gas exploration had been reviewed.…”

Injection profiling in horizontal wells using temperature warmback analysis

“…Temperature data are inspected to locate nonisothermal slug, given the pronounced contrast between the slug's temperature and the temperature of surrounding environment. Comparing slug location at different time intervals helps determine local slug velocity, and consequently, the local flow rate can be determined given the size of the injection tubing/casing [21]. To avoid necessity of non-isothermal slug injection, injection stops to allow wellbore fluid to warmback.…”