Using Streamline and Reservoir Simulation to Improve Waterflood Management

Abstract

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.