1887

Abstract

Waterflooding is a common secondary oil recovery process. Performance of waterfloods in mature fields with a significant number of wells can be improved with minimal infrastructure investment by optimizing injection/production rates of individual wells. However, a major bottleneck in the optimization framework is the large number of reservoir flow simulations often required. In this work we propose a new method based on streamline-derived information that significantly reduces these computational costs in addition to making use of the computational efficiency of streamline simulation itself. We seek to maximize the long-term net present value of a waterflood by determining optimal individual well rates, given an expected albeit uncertain oil price and a total fluid injection volume. We approach the optimization problem by decomposing it into two stages which can be implemented in a computationally efficient manner. The two-stage streamline-based optimization approach can be an effective technique when applied to reservoirs with a large number of wells in need of an efficient waterflooding strategy over a 5 to 15 year period.

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/content/papers/10.3997/2214-4609.20143194
2012-09-10
2024-03-28
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http://instance.metastore.ingenta.com/content/papers/10.3997/2214-4609.20143194
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