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Overcome Viscous Fingering Effect in Heavy Oil Reservoirs by an Optimized Smart Water Injection Scheme Part II
- Publisher: European Association of Geoscientists & Engineers
- Source: Conference Proceedings, IOR 2017 - 19th European Symposium on Improved Oil Recovery, Apr 2017, Volume 2017, p.1 - 22
Abstract
Viscous fingering is a major obstacle to successful waterflooding in heavy oil reservoirs, as it results in premature water breakthrough resulting in bypassed oil and an underdeveloped oil bank ahead. To reduce viscous fingering, the composition of injected fluid needs to be tailored to create a favorable mobility ratio with the oil to be displaced. Smart waterflooding often entails wettability alteration in the reservoir, and it can also lead to a change in mobility ratio, which depending on the value, may have either a negative or positive impact on oil recovery.
This study is an extended study from Kadeethum et al. (2017a) because in that paper only one static realization was analyzed. This practice may lead to a bias and unreliable result because we did not include the uncertainties into the system. Therefore, a statistical analysis is used to reveal the smart waterflooding true potential. In this study, smart waterflooding outperforms conventional waterflooding regarding oil recovery, with incremental recovery reaching as high as five percent. Moreover, smart waterflooding also significantly decelerates the water cut (WCUT) trend by subduing the effect of viscous fingering and decreasing the water relative permeability.