Abstract
As regulatory limits for oil discharge become more stringent and environmental awareness increases, produced water re-injection has become increasingly attractive for operators. However, as offshore developments become more complex, with new fields producing through existing facilities, the PWRI design team must face the problems involved in combining and re-injecting potentially incompatible fluids and/or production chemicals.
The Cleeton facilities in the North Sea provide an example of such a PWRI system. These facilities are the hub for the Easington Catchment Area (ECA) and are due to process fluids from an increasing number of new developments in coming years. This paper describes how the results of an extensive laboratory-based formation damage test program (SPE 80257) were combined with near-wellbore injection simulations and economic modelling studies to enable the economics of the treatment program to be defined. This laboratory study demonstrated that one of the production chemicals present in the expected co-mingled fluids exhibited a significant incompatibility with the formation rock, leading to in situ precipitation near the injection face. This resulted in significant reductions in injectivity. Additional work demonstrated that a number of remedial treatments were available to restore injectivity. Near well-bore injection simulation studies were used to predict the rate of reduction of well injectivity and therefore the timing of requirements for remedial treatments at the injection well. This enabled the economics of the treatment programme to be defined. This in turn allowed the cost benefit of the "PWRI incompatible chemicals" during the production stage to be weighed against the cost of remediation treatments during the re-injection stage. The outcome of this work was to recommend that an alternative chemical strategy was adopted in order to reduce the total costs associated with the proposed PWRI system. Preliminary data from the field implementation of the PWRI scheme is also discussed.