In order to properly meet up with the ever-increasing demand for petroleum products worldwide, it has become increasingly necessary to produce oil and gas fields more economically and efficiently. Waterflooding is currently the most widely used secondary recovery method to improve oil recovery after primary depletion. A crucial component required to conduct an efficient waterflooding operation is an optimal production setting, most especially with respect to the amount of water involved. This research work has been carried out to develop a model that can be used to maximize oil recovery and minimize water production with the least amount and number of waterflood variables in order to minimize the secondary recovery investment cost. The gradient-based approach to optimize the production and net present value (NPV) from a waterflood reservoir using the flow rates or bottom hole pressures of the production wells as the controlling factors with the use of smart well technology was applied. In this approach, a variant of the optimal switching time technique was used in the optimization process to equalize the arrival times of the waterfront at multiple producers, thereby increasing the cumulative oil production. The optimization procedure involved maximizing the objective function (NPV) by adjusting a set of manipulated variables (flow rates). The optimal pressure profile of the waterflood scenario that gave the maximum NPV was obtained as the solution to the waterflood problem. The proposed optimization methodology was applied to a waterflood process carried out on a reservoir field developed by a five-spot recovery design in the Niger Delta area of Nigeria, which was used as a case study. The forward run was carried out with a commercial reservoir oil simulator. The results of the waterflood optimization revealed that an increase in the net present value of up to 9.7% and an increase in cumulative production of up to 30% from the base case could be achieved.
There are a good numbers of brown hydrocarbon reservoirs, with a substantial amount of bypassed oil. These reservoirs are said to be brown, because a huge chunk of its recoverable oil have been produced. Since a significant number of prominent oil fields are matured and the number of new discoveries is declining, it is imperative to assess performances of waterflooding in such reservoirs; taking an undersaturated reservoir as a case study. It should be recalled that Waterflooding is widely accepted and used as a means of secondary oil recovery method, sometimes after depletion of primary energy sources. The effects of permeability distribution on flood performances is of concerns in this study. The presence of high permeability streaks could lead to an early water breakthrough at the producers, thus reducing the sweep efficiency in the field. A solution approach adopted in this study was reserve water injection. A reverse approach because, a producing well is converted to water injector while water injector well is converted to oil producing well. This optimization method was applied to a waterflood process carried out on a reservoir field developed by a two - spot recovery design in the Niger Delta area of Nigeria that is being used as a case study. Simulation runs were carried out with a commercial reservoir oil simulator. The result showed an increase in oil production with a significant reduction in water-cut. The Net Present Value, NPV, of the project was re-evaluated with present oil production. The results of the waterflood optimization revealed that an increase in the net present value of up to 20% and an increase in cumulative production of up to 27% from the base case was achieved. The cost of produced water treatment for re-injection and rated higher water pump had little impact on the overall project economy. Therefore, it can conclude that changes in well status in wells status in an heterogenous hydrocarbon reservoir will increase oil production.
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