Autonomously Controlling the Conformance of Injection-Well Fluids

Abstract

As production declines over time, the injection of fluids is required to enhance oil recovery and/or maintain the reservoir pressure. Whether applied at field startup or as a secondary recovery technique, waterflooding can boost oil recovery from less than 30% to 30–50%. The common problems associated with waterflooding include loss of injectivity, premature injector failure, and injection conformance. This can also lead to issues around insufficient voidage replacement, which can result in lower reservoir pressure and the production of fluid with a higher gas/oil ratio. In total field recovery, this ultimately means lower production and oil left untapped in the well. To remediate the issue of conformance, costly and often complex interventions and redrills were traditionally used to restore water-injection capability. Also, passive outflow-control devices have been used successfully to somewhat improve the fluid conformance from injection wells. However, they may fail in reservoirs with complex/dynamic properties including propagating/dilating fractures. Advanced Wells in Injection Wells There are a number of considerations when planning a water-injection completion, particularly around both the rock and fluid properties, as well as the credible risks that could occur, namely: - Uneven displacement of hydrocarbon - Fracture growth short-circuiting injectant-proximal wells - Fracture growth breaching caprock/basement seal - Crossflow, plugging, and solids fill Advanced completion options include deploying passive flow-control devices. For example, inflow-control devices (ICDs) are unable to react to dynamic changes in reservoir/well properties. This often requires production-logging-tool (PLT) logs, distributed temperature sensors, and/or tracers to be run and, if available, to apply the sleeve option. Alternatively, active (intelligent) completions, such as inflow-control valves, can be used, but they tend to be expensive and complicated and are limited to the number of zones. This technique also requires frequent analysis of data from the well to perform such actions. Tendeka, a global specialist in advanced completions, production solutions, and sand control, has developed FloFuse, a new and exclusively autonomous rate-limiting outflow-control device (AOCD) (Fig. 1). Using the analogy and inspiration of a home fuse box, which contains many individual fuses to control various parts of a building, the AOCD can control the excessive rate that passes through a specific section of a well, causing tripping once the threshold is reached. By almost shutting, i.e., significantly choking, the injection fluid into the fractures crossing the well, the AOCD autonomously prevents growth and excessive fluid injection into the thief/fracture zones and maintains a balanced or prescribed injection distribution. Like other flow-control valves, this device should be installed in several compartments in the injection well. Initially, devices operate as normal passive outflow control, but if the injected flow rate through the valve exceeds a designed limit, the device will automatically shut off. This allows the denied fluid to that specific compartment to be distributed among the neighboring compartments.