1.: Background

Historically, waterflood has been viewed as largely the responsibility of the reservoir engineer. That was primarily because waterflood considerations tended to be heavily focused on the displacement process and the associated recovery impacts. While those are critically important to waterflood success, it is now much more widely recognized that waterflood is a process with many different moving parts, and it therefore requires the input of a wide range of disciplines, each of which needs to interface effectively with the others, to deliver a fully optimized project.

Waterflood remains by far the most widely used process that uses an external energy source to improve recovery. Furthermore, it has been successfully used for more than a century. The theoretical basis for waterflood displacement has been understood for quite some time and is well-covered in the available literature (Willhite 1986; Warner 2015). Despite the focus on this aspect of waterflood, it is only in recent years that there has been any detailed inspection of the critical success factors across the full range of disciplines involved. Furthermore, not all the factors have been particularly well-documented. This book is one in a series of publications that aims to redress some of those shortcomings by looking at a range of factors influencing success in waterflood design and operation.