Granger Low - Waterflood

As oil prices hit the sky, more and more companies want to maximize oil recovery from their matured pools, and Waterflood is the most popular technique to accomplish this.

Waterflood is conducted by injecting water into the pool through the selected wells called injectors. The injected water will sweep oil to adjacent producers while maintaining pool pressure. Reservoir pressure maintenance is very important because the fundamental production mechanism of oil and gas is based on the pressure difference between the reservoir and wellbore pressures.

Steps:

Prior to the onset of a waterflood, careful reservoir characteristic studies should be done to identify waterflood feasibility. These include geology, reservoir fluid, rock and pressure analyses. The gas-oil ratio and water production history are also valuable information.  Proven will evaluate oil reserves and recovery factors. Economic analysis can be a part of waterflood feasibility studies.

A waterflood development plan can be broken down into the following steps:

• Data catalog – A review and analysis of the well data to determine availability and usability of data required for waterflood feasibility and design. It is to get up to speed quickly, and ensure that the scope is on the track right from the beginning.
• Primary production performance evaluations, reviews of reservoir characteristics such as gas caps, aquifers and faults.
• Recommendation for development planning on time and budget
• Waterflood design and injector selection/preparation.
• Estimation of water volume to be injected and identification of water source
• Waterflood Feasibility Study to understand potential ultimate recovery from the application area
• waterflood application submission to the ERCB
• Directive 51 application

Proven Expertise:

At Proven Reserves, we have expertise in all stages of waterflooding, from feasibility studies to implementation. We have worked on optimizing over 200 floods and started more than 50 of those. Ninety-five percent of the time we can add $20 million in NPV to floods we review.

One of our many successful waterfloods are in the Zama field, Alberta. By identifying and initiating over 50 waterfloods, the value of the project was increased to over $200 million. Our charge to the client was less than $10,000 per pool.