Reservoir Management Using Streamline-Based Flood Efficiency Maps and Application to Rate Optimization
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Abstract3-D streamlines provide an effective tool for reservoir management because of their ability to display reservoir flow and well connections in a physically intuitive manner. Streamlines have been extensively used to investigate the interaction between heterogeneity and well patterns and also for rate allocation and pattern balancing. More recently, streamlines have been used in conjunction with constrained optimization techniques for improving waterflood performance via rate control. Field scale rate optimization problems, however, involve highly complex reservoir models, production and facilities constraints and a large number of unknowns, making them inaccessible for routine waterflood management.In this paper we provide a simple and easy to use workflow for waterflood rate optimization using streamline-based flood efficiency maps that display the flux and time of flight distribution amongst producing wells. We demonstrate the use of flood efficiency map to optimize the injection/production rates to maximize waterflood sweep efficiency by equalizing the average time of flight (TOF) amongst the producing wells in regional basis. Our optimization approach is extremely efficient because it relies on simple analytic calculations to compute weighting factors for injection and production rates to minimize the TOF variance amongst producing wells. Because the approach does not rely on formal and complex optimization tools, it is particularly well-suited for large-scale field application. Also, the approach can be used with both streamline and finite difference simulators. For finite-difference simulations, the streamlines and time of flight are derived from the flux field generated by the simulator. Multiple examples are presented to support the robustness and efficiency of the proposed waterflood management scheme. These include 2D synthetic examples for validation and a 3D field application.
