Modeling and analysis of secondary oil recovery with water flooding from a heterogeneous reservoir through advanced wells.

Abstract

Oil and gas will remain the most important source of energy for the foreseeable future according to DNV’s Energy Transition Outlook 2021, and there is an urgent need to improve oil and gas recovery with less carbon footprint to meet the future energy demands. For the extraction of oil from the reservoir, horizontal drilling is being applied due to its higher recovery rate. These horizontal wells are advanced wells equipped with downhole Flow Control Devices (FCDs), sand screens, zonal isolation as well as monitoring and control systems, etc. FCDs are the key elements of advanced wells. The main objective of this paper is to modelling and simulation of secondary oil recovery with water flooding from a heterogeneous reservoir through advanced wells completed by main types of FCDs. In this paper, a computational study of oil recovery from a black oil reservoir is performed through modelling and simulation using the Petrel© software. The modified ‘Egg Model’ is used which is a synthetic heterogeneous reservoir model consisting of an ensemble of relatively small three-dimensional realizations of a channelized oil reservoir produced under water flooding conditions. A comparative analysis of reservoir models with vertical open hole wells and horizontal open hole wells is presented where it is found that the horizontal well produces 23% more oil. Also, horizontal open-hole wells are further equipped with ICDs which have reduced the water production by 91.4% and have also delayed the water breakthrough in comparison to open-hole horizontal wells.