Application of Inflow Control Valve (ICV) in the Water Injector Well: Case Study on Alpha Field

Abstract

Abstract Inflow Control Valve (ICV) have been used in the past to enhance performance of producing wells for unfavorable environments, such as non-uniform permeability and pressure variation along the well sections. Nowadays, since Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) technique has been advanced, the ICV is introduced to be installed in the injector well, with the aim to produce more oil from the reservoir. The key factor in the success of this project was the use of Petrel to simulate the injection sweep across the entire Alpha reservoir section. Nozzle type ICV is used to obtain a piston-like water injection profile, and thus to achieve the objective of increasing sweep efficiency to recover more oil, and decrease water breakthrough in high permeability zone, if connected to the producers. Firstly, the reservoir is analyzed to choose the best candidate of injection well. Then, the sector modeling is run at the region near the injection well. The sector modeling reduces the time required to run the ICV simulation study. After that, the Base Case is created with open hole injection well. The result of the run is recorded. Then, ICV is installed with the sensitivity studies on the different valve apertures. The results show that the installation of ICV improves the oil recovery by 2%. The optimal depletion strategy for major oil reservoir is pressure maintenance by water injection with ICV. The full field simulation shows that the water production is reduced by 20% for the full field. Therefore, it shows that intelligent completion concepts can be applied at injection well besides at production well. This paper presents an innovative completion technology, fine tuned by reservoir simulations, for balancing the water injection profile into various sand formations zones in an open-hole completed injector well, increasing sweep efficiency.