Oilfield Water Production, Handling and Injection

Description

For every barrel of oil produced we produce 3 barrels of water. Water handling, treatment, and disposal represent the biggest operating cost for most oilfield operators. In addition to produced water, large quantities of seawater and water from other sources is treated and injected. The economic success of oil and gas development projects depends very much on our ability to successfully manage water. This course discusses methods, equipment, and tools used for testing, diagnosing, and minimizing water production from oil and gas wells. Reservoir engineering and surface facility aspects of water handling, treatment, re-injection, and injection well fracturing are extensively discussed. The impact of the growth of thermal fractures and fractures driven by particle plugging on injector performance and oil recovery by waterflood is discussed. Significant cost savings can be achieved in all aspects of water production, handling, and disposal through better diagnostic tools, better water handling, and better treatment and re-injection strategies. The course covers the fundamental theory and the latest technological developments.

Objectives

By the end of this course, participants will learn how to:

• Specify water quality requirements for a water injection project
• Simulate the impact of water quality on injector performance
• Make facilities decisions to ensure good long-term well injectivity
• Conduct diagnosis of water production problems
• Identify potential sources of produced water
• Select possible remediation methods for water shutoff
• Choose facilities to better handle produced water shutoff
• Test injection wells to identify injection profiles
• Select injection well patterns for optimizing waterfloods
• Simulate the impact of thermal effects on injection well performance
• Evaluate the impact of growing fractures on waterflood performance

Target Audience

Reservoir, production, and surface facilities engineers responsible for providing reservoir engineering support, facilities planning and drilling/completions recommendations for oil and gas assets, engineers and other personnel involved in providing equipment and chemicals for diagnosing/reducing water production, improving injector performance and treating produced water.

Production Operations Outline

The course covers the following topics:

• Introduction Causes of excess water production
• Data collection for problem identification
• Identifying the causes of excess water production
• Wellbore and near-wellbore water shutoff technologies
• Gels for water shutoff
• Polymer flooding
• Down-hole sink technology
• Selection of water control treatment
• Analysis and treatment of produced water
• Scale, bacteria and corrosion problems
• Injection well testing
• Water quality requirements for re-injection and surface disposal
• Fractured injection wells
• Injection into unconsolidated sands (with sand control)
• Impact of water re-injection on reservoir performance
• Economics and post-treatment analysis