Chapter 9: Modeling Three-Dimensional Water-Oil Displacements

This chapter covers water-oil displacement phenomena in three dimensions. Many water-oil displacement flow complexities occur when viscous, capillary, and gravity forces are simultaneously interacting, even in idealized homogeneous reservoirs. In real oil reservoirs, these complexities are compounded by the presence of many types of geologic heterogeneities, the instabilities at the displacement front because of unfavorable mobility ratios, and the layout and types of injection and production wells.

In this chapter, the limited laboratory studies of 3D water-oil displacements are discussed. Next, simple historical methods proposed to predict waterflood performance are described, as well as example comparisons to actual oil reservoirs’ waterflood performance data. Most of this chapter is devoted to current geocellular and numerical reservoir simulation software packages and their applications both for history matching actual waterflood performance and for predicting future waterflood oil rates and reserves for developed and undeveloped oil reservoirs.