Scaling A Water Coning Control Installation in Bottom Water Drive Reservoir by Inspectional Analysis

Abstract

The theoretical paper presents development and verification of dimensionless groups describing a novel "smart" well completion with downhole water loop (DWL) used for stimulation of wells affected by water coning, where the drained water is injected downhole into the same aquifer. A well producing from an oil reservoir with bottom water coning is completed at the top of oil-for oil inflow and lifting, below the oil/water contact -for water drainage, and deeper in the same aquifer -for water injection. The two lower completions are hydraulically isolated from the top completion and work as a "water loop" with the drainage completion controlling OWC deformation (water cone) and injecting the drained water into the same aquifer. Computer simulations and a few field trials, to date, have shown that the smart well would produce more oil and sooner by removing water invasion to the oil-producing completion. However, designing such a well is site specific (i.e. controlled by multitude of the well, reservoir and fluid properties) and requires massive computations to balance the system hydrodynamically by finding a right combination of rates and completions placement. Dimensionless analysis is, therefore, needed to simplify the system's description with few dimensionless groups.The paper presents development and verification of dimensionless groups using past research, analogy of smart wells to conventional wells, and inspectional analysis that provides additional dimensionless groups -specific for DWL wells. The procedure used for finding the groups ---with detailed explanation of steps taken to solve the problem ---has been provided in the paper for those interested in scientific aspect of the study. Also discussed are the physical meanings of the dimensionless groups.What other professionals may find interesting in this paper is the way we verified the groups and used them for design. In this part of our study, the final cluster of dimensionless groups has been validated by testing sensitivity of the dimensionless well model output to varying physical parameters of the reservoir-well system without changing the values if the dimensionless groups in the input.