Using Streamline and Reservoir Simulation to Improve Waterflood Management

Abstract

Streamlines provide snapshots of flow patterns in the field, which simulation engineers can use to shorten the history match cycle when validating reservoir models. They can also help engineers develop injection strategies and improve the sweep efficiency by analyzing flow patterns and by estimating injector to producer relationships in the field during computations of various prediction scenarios. Our strategy in this study is to use details of reservoir conditions obtained by traditional reservoir simulations and calculate streamlines from the computed flow field. Saudi Aramco's in-house developed simulator POWERS and its post processing environment have been enhanced to generate streamlines from computed reservoir flow fields. A streamline tracing software developed at Texas A&M University and POWERS has been customized to generate streamline outputs. The algorithm used for computations is parallelized to run on Linux clusters. Several features, such as computations of injector/producer allocation factor and injector efficiencies, have been implemented in our streamline generation tool kit. In this paper, we present two case studies to illustrate advantages of streamlines when used in a workflow along with reservoir simulations to improve water flow managements of the field. Our analysis resulted in an optimal design with a fewer number of injectors to maintain the production target. In addition, streamline analysis helped us to find optimal well locations for injectors.

Improving Water Flooding Management through Facies Remodeling and the Use of Streamlines and Finite Difference Simulators

“…Streamline simulation is a very effective and time saving tool for predicting best sweep efficiency. It gives an efficient aid in visualizing streams between injectors and producers, allocate injection rates for injectors, identifies fruitless water cycling, wasted water coning and highlight the areas with poor sweep efficiency [9]. Unlike analytical ways which have almost fixed areal sweep efficiency according to flood patterns, this tool uses simulation velocity field and inter well connectivity for designing an optimized injection allocation [10].To optimize the sweep efficiency the streamline uses a concept of Time of Flight (TOF) distribution, by which the areal sweep efficiency is easily optimized and enhanced in complex reservoirs to increase oil recovery in the poorly swept areas [11].…”