Monitoring of thermal enhanced oil recovery processes with electromagnetic methods

Abstract

Research in applying electromagnetic methods for imaging thermal enhanced oil recovery has progressed significantly during the past eighteen months. Working together with researchers at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (LBL) and supported by a group of industrial sponsors we have focused our effort on field system development and doing field surveys connected with EOR operations. Field surveys were recently completed at the Lost Hills No.3 oil field and at UC Richmond Field station. At Lost Hills, crosshole EM data sets were collected before a new phase of steam injection for EOR and again four months after the onset of steaming. The two data sets were nearly identical suggesting that very little steam had been injected into this borehole. This is in accord with the operators records which indicate injectivity problems with this particular well. At Richmond we conducted a salt water injection monitoring experiment where 50,000 gallons of salt water were injected in a shallow aquifer and crosshole EM data were collected using the injection well and several observation wells. We applied the imaging code to some of the collected data and produced an image showing that the salt water slug has propagated 8--10 m from the injector into the aquifer. This result is partially confirmed by prior calculations and well logging data. Applying the EM methods to the problem of oil field characterization essentially means extending the borehole resistivity log into the region between wells. Since the resistivity of a sedimentary environment is often directly dependent on the fluids in the rock the knowledge of the resistivity distribution within an oil field can be invaluable for finding missed or bypassed oil or for mapping the overall structure. With small modification the same methods used for mapping EOR process can be readily applied to determining the insitu resistivity structure.