Water-flood Patterns

Ali N.
Factors Affecting Selection of Waterflood Pattern
When an engineer plans a warerflood, he has a number of guidelines to
follow. The proposed water flood pattern should fulfill the followings:
1- Provide desired oil production capacity.
2- Provide sufficient water injection rate to yield desired oil productivity.
3- Maximize oil recovery with a minimum of water production.
4- Take advantage of known reservoir nonuniformities, i.e., directional
permeability, regional permeability differences, formation fractures, dip, etc.
5- Be compatible with the existing well pattern and require a minimum of
new wells.
6- Be compatible with flooding operations of other operators on adjacent
leases.
• The first choice to be made is the flooding pattern - that is, whether
the water flood should be one of a repeating pattern or should
attempt to treat the reservoir as a whole, using a peripheral flood,
end –to- end flood, down- the –center line of injection wells, or
some combination of these. A peripheral flood generally yields the
maximum oil recovery with minimum of produced water. In such
a flood.
• production of significant quantities of water can be delayed until only
the last row of producers remains. On the other hand, because of the
unusually small number of injection wells in a peripheral flood as
compared with the number of producing wells, it takes a long time
for injected water to fill up the reservoir gas space, with the result
that there is a delay in the timing of flush oil production. This
is particularly the case where a portion of the injected water is
lost to the aquifer. Another factor to be considered in deciding on
peripheral waterflood is whether the formation permeability is
great enough to permit the movement of water at the desired
rate over the distance of several well spacings from injection well to
the last line of producers.
• Of course, the operator of a peripheral waterflood may choose to convert
watered -out producers to injection and thus keep the injection wells as
close as possible to the waterflood front without bypassing any movable
oil. However moving the location of injection wells frequently require laying
longer surface water lines, so this is discouraged in high-pressure waterfloods. In
dipping reservoirs, operators tend to peripherally flood to take maximum
advantage of the formation dip in evening out the waterflood front. To
summarize, the choice of either a peripheral or a repeating- pattern waterflood
is usually made on the basis of the area and dimensions of the reservoir or lease
to be flooded, the need for a fast initial oil production response, and the
formation dip and permeability.
If the factors weight in favor of a pattern flood, the engineer then must
decide the type of pattern. Where the wells are on square spacing, as is
usual, five- spots and nine- spots are the most common flooding
patterns. Laboratory experiments have indicated that both of these yield
nearly the same oil recovery and WOR performance. The choice can be
made primarily on the basis of the water-oil mobility ratio, although
reservoir heterogeneity is frequently a factor. The mobility ratio is a
measure of the injectivity of a well relative to its productivity. At
unfavorable mobility ratio (M˃1) the water injectivity of an injector exceeds
the oil productivity of a producer after fill up, so to balance the desired
oil productivity with water injection, a pattern having more producers than
injectors is indicated. For favorable mobility ratios, the reverse is true
and the recommended pattern should have more injectors than producers.
Thus we note that while a mobi lity ratio less than unity is favorable from
sweep aspects, it is unfavorable from an injectivity standpoint.
The water-flood operator is generally hesitant to convert a good producer to
water injection and usually prefers to use a well whose productivity is
poorer. Such a decision is unfortunate when the water-flood is operating at
favorable mobility ratio, since the injection rate is thus further impaired.
In short, poor producers do not usually make good injection wells, and in
fact more frequently make poor injectors. Where directional permeability
or reservoir fractures are known to exist, the prudent engineer will
arrange his pattern so that the direction of maximum permeability or
orientation of reservoir fractures is in the same direction as the line joining
adjacent injectors. As we have noted before, fractures or directional
permeability in the injector- producer direction results in early water
breakthrough and in subsequent large volumes of produced water.
Sometimes, the directional movement of water can have disastrous results.