Abstract
Water flooding performance evaluation and recovery prediction with relatively easy tools has always been among the top aims of reservoir engineering studies, especially for mature reservoirs in high water-cut period. Relative permeability curves are basic required properties reflecting multi-phase flow characteristic and used together with production history to evaluate reservoir performance. In high water-cut period the relative permeability ratio deviate from the empirical straight-line form, which makes traditional models less effective or erroneous in performance prediction. This paper presents a new relative permeability ratio model which can convert the non-linear characteristic of this problem into linear expression. And a new simple water flooding performance analysis technique is developed based on the new model, which can be used to forecast ultimate recovery factor and the corresponding sweep efficiency. The main advantage of this work is taking into account of high water-cut characteristic with less model parameters compared with other improved models. Synthetic case and field examples demonstrated the advantages of this method in parameter solving and consistency in history matching. The proposed technique in this work can be used as predictive analysis tool in forecasting ultimate recovery and performance evaluation for mature water flooding reservoirs.
Highlights
Many sophisticated simulation software are available in water flooding performance evaluation and recovery prediction, petroleum engineers are still in need of simple tools or correlations for dynamic analysis due to time-consuming or data shortage
The use of relative permeability together with production history provides an effective way in reservoir performance evaluation, combining flow mechanism and production practice
After analyzing of a large quantity of reservoir relative permeability curves, we found that relative permeability ratio krw/kro and normalized water saturation Swd shows a mathematical relation which can be described by equation (3)
Summary
Many sophisticated simulation software are available in water flooding performance evaluation and recovery prediction, petroleum engineers are still in need of simple tools or correlations for dynamic analysis due to time-consuming or data shortage. Over the past decades of years water-oil ratio (WOR) analysis has been widely used for performance evaluation and production forecasting for water flooding reservoirs. Ershagi and Omoregie [1] presented a recovery ratio and water-cut relation called “X-plot”, as shown in equation (1), based on the concepts of fractional flow and the frontal advance theory (Buckley and Leverett), which can predict recoverable oil volume by extrapolating the curve to arbitrary value of water-cut (fw). These improved models have not obtained wide application because of tedious unknown-parameter matching and solving problems or generating inconsistency with real reservoir performance
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