June 2014 - Volume 9 Issue 5

The Wrong Way to Flood the Cardium

Accusations
 

Waterflood Noncontainment Risk Mitigation

The Wrong Way to Flood the Cardium
Immediate Breakthrough Shocks Operators



     Early water breakthrough in Cardium floods. It’s happening more all the time.

     Some producers see breakthrough in as short as 1 month from the start of injection. Talk about a shock front!

     Multi-fractured horizontal wells have been a great boon to production of tight oil formations. However, when drilled in the wrong azimuth, they can turn a water flood into a disaster.

     Most operators drill their horizontal wells east-west ignoring the permeability trend. When they introduce multiple fractures along their horizontal wells they often find they have created a short circuit path for water to their producers.

     Permeability trends can be established by geological channel direction or shoreface azimuth. Super imposed on those can be stress field trends that may be totally different than the underlying sedimentation directions.

     Operators ignore these perm trends at their own risk. Recently one operator wrote down reserves by 50% because injection water was short circuiting to the producers without sweeping any oil.

     Proven Reserves has experts in flood technology that use our Optiflood process to avoid early break through. Call us before you flood. It’s cheaper to fix it than after all the wells are drilled.

MetroPetro


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Did You Know...
 Waterflood Noncontainment
Risk Mitigation

The AER now requires applicants of ER Schemes to notify abandoned well owners.

This is just one change from the new version of the AER’s Direction 065 released last month.

When it comes to injection, the AER is concerned about the risk of (1) contamination to ground water, (2) injection noncontainment, and (3) water to surface.

Event
2014 SPE Calgary Section AGM
Calgary, AB
16 June 2014
speca.ca
Event
2014 SPE Golf Tournament
Priddis, AB
17 June 2014
speca.ca
Technical Luncheon
Optimizing Fracture
Fluid Selection
Calgary, AB
18 June 2014
cwls.org