A numerical study of the impact of waterflood pattern size on ultimate recovery in undersaturated oil reservoirs

The reserve growth potential of existing conventional oil reservoirs is huge. This research, through numerical simulation, aims to evaluate pattern size reduction as a strategy for improving waterflood recovery in undersaturated oil reservoirs. A plethora of studies have reported improvements in waterflood recovery resulting from pattern size reduction in heterogeneous reservoirs. The dependence of waterflood recovery on pattern size was attributed to factors such as areal reservoir discontinuity, preferential flooding directions, “wedge-edge” oil recovery, irregular pattern geometry, communication with water-bearing zones, vertical reservoir discontinuity, and project economics (Driscoll, 1974). Though many of these publications relied on decline curve analysis in estimating ultimate oil recovery, simulations completed in this thesis support their findings, specifically for compartmentalized reservoirs, fractured reservoirs, and layered reservoirs. Geostatistically-generated permeability fields were employed in the creation of various types of reservoir models. These models were populated with vertical production and injection wells. Sensitivity analysis was then performed on three development scenarios: 160, 40, and 10 acre five-spots. Based on assigned production and injection constraints, the quantity of oil recovered at simulation termination was used to calculate ultimate recovery efficiency. In homogeneous reservoir models, simulation results suggest that waterflood recovery was independent of pattern size. Similar results were also obtained from models with highly-variable non-zero permeabilities. On the other hand, pattern size reduction was found to enhance oil recovery from reservoir models with a high degree of permeability anisotropy. In such reservoirs, recovery was found to be highly dependent on bottom-hole injection pressures. The higher the injection pressure the larger the quantity of oil bypassed by widely spaced patterns. Likewise, high infill potential exists for reservoir models exhibiting areal discontinuity. In these types of models, the improvement in waterflood recovery resulting from pattern size reduction was directly related to the percentage of imbedded zero-permeability grid blocks. Ultimate oil recovery depended on the percolation of permeable grid blocks between production and injection wells. Increasing well density also enhanced waterflood recovery in vertically discontinuous reservoir models. In such layered reservoirs, the amount oil unswept with large patterns was considerably diminished because of the improved injection profiles associated with tighter patterns.