Chapter 11: Waterflooding
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Published:2007
H.R. (Hal) Warner, Jr. "Waterflooding", Reservoir Engineering and Petrophysics, Larry W. Lake, Edward D. Holstein
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This chapter concerns the use of water injection to increase the production from oil reservoirs, and the technologies that have been developed over the past 50+ years to evaluate, design, operate, and monitor such projects. Use of water to increase oil production is known as “secondary recovery” and typically follows “primary production,” which uses the reservoir’s natural energy (fluid and rock expansion, solution-gas drive, gravity drainage, and aquifer influx) to produce oil.
The principal reason for waterflooding an oil reservoir is to increase the oil-production rate and, ultimately, the oil recovery. This is accomplished by “voidage replacement”—injection of water to increase the reservoir pressure to its initial level and maintain it near that pressure. The water displaces oil from the pore spaces, but the efficiency of such displacement depends on many factors (e.g., oil viscosity and rock characteristics). In oil fields such as Wilmington (California, U.S.A.) and Ekofisk (North Sea), voidage replacement also has been used to mitigate additional surface subsidence. In these cases, the high porosity of the unconsolidated sandstones of the Wilmington oil field’s reservoirs and of the soft chalk reservoir rock in the Ekofisk oil field had compacted significantly when the reservoir pressure was drawn down during primary production.
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