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Introduction
The importance of enhanced oil recovery technology (EOR) cannot be overemphasized,
especially in the context of a mature petroleum province or a country, such as the U.S., with
declining domestic production and increasing imports. The decline of domestic production and
increasing of petroleum imports reminds us of our increasing dependence on foreign
petroleum supplies. Combined with the fact that the probability of finding new discoveries is
continually decreasing reinforces the need for EOR oil recovery technology.
The significance of EOR lies in the promise it holds for increasing the expected production
from existing oil fields. In mature petroleum provinces, such as the onshore US in general,
growth of reserves in existing oil fields typically contributes more to the industrys continued
viability than the discovery of new fields. In other words, in thoroughly explored provinces,
better technology, more accurate reservoir characterization, and more effective production
from known fields typically add new reserves faster than exploration for new fields.
It has been known that infill drilling can improve the recovery of hydrocarbon by accelerating
the hydrocarbon productions because most reservoirs in the real world are not
homogeneous.1-7 Driscoll1 and Gould et al..2, 4 summarized the various factors that contribute
to increased recovery after infill drilling in 1980s:
Areal heterogeneity
Recently, with the increasing demand for energy and favourable oil and gas prices, more and
more fields all over the world are undergoing infill drilling. The advances in reservoir
management provide a much clear picture of hydrocarbon distribution in the reservoirs which
helps petroleum engineers to plan highly effective well profiles and the advanced imaging
technologies allow the hydrocarbon field operators to select the best locations for infill drilling
to optimize well placement.
In the past 20+ years, many infill drilling projects have been put into production and lots of
valuable experiences have been gained on infill drilling. Therefore, the purpose of this paper
is to present lessons learned and best practices on infill drilling from published literatures and
provides a concise compendium to the current understanding of current industry infill drilling
practice.
Reservoir type
Rock type
Initial
well
spacing
Lessons Learned
References
Barrow
Island Field
Australia
offshore oil field
Highly complex
sandstones
40-acre
Field production
significantly increased.
29
Bombay
High
Offshore field in
India
N/A
32
East
Canton
F-pad
Oil field in
Prudhoe Bay
Norway offshore
oil field
Hugoton
Onshore gas
field in USA
Highly
heterogeneous
carbonate
Lowpermeability
sands
Heterogeneous
sandstone
Highly
heterogeneous
reservoirs
Shallow marine
carbonate
LeonardianRestricted
Platform
Oil field in
Permian Basin
Highly Complex
carbonate
80-acre
14
Moxa Arch
Gas field in
Wyoming
640acre
17
Niger Delta
Highly
heterogeneous
sands
Poorly connect
sands
Gullfaks
Field
40-acre
80-acre
N/A
640acre
N/A
27
19
28
8-10,
20-21
16
Fluvial deposit
sands
N/A
35
Stratified
dolomite
80-acre
12
Ozona
Onshore gas
field in Texas
Complex
turbidite sands
320acre
Seventy-six
West
Oil field in
Texas
Highly complex
sandstones
N/A
Tapis Field
Highly
heterogeneous
sandstone
Dolomites
N/A
North Rlley
Wasson
San Andres
Field
80-acre
24-25
13
18
30
Methodology
The moving window method is a rigorous, model-based analysis method. It is based on a
combination of the material balance equation and the pseudo-steady state flow equation,
simplified by assuming that many properties are constant within an individual moving domain.
The result is a linear regression equation that is applied within each window.46
The moving window technique is a set of empirically derived approximations and comparisons
that attempt to mimic what a reservoir engineer does when faced with a single infill location
evaluation. It can quickly evaluate the infill drilling potentials within weeks even with
thousands of wells. The primary advantages of the technique are its speed and reliance upon
well location and production data only.
Figure 1 shows the diagram of the moving window method and it consists of a multitude of
local analyses, each in an areal window centered on an existing well. The regression
coefficients for each window are determined by regressing parameters for the wells within
each window. The windows are limited in size, e.g., 3000 acres, and generally contain 5 to 20
wells. If the number of wells in a window is less than a minimum value, e.g., 3-5, a regional or
global regression is used instead of a local regression.
Figure 1. Diagram of the fast method showing how the window moves across area. The small
blue circles are the well locations and big circles are the moving domains.47
Applications
The Ozona Field is located in Crockett County in Southwest Texas and it contains two major
producing sands with about 1,800 wells.41-42 These sands are complex turbidite deposits
characterized by lenticular gas-bearing members at depths of 6,000 to 7,500 ft with
permeability from less than 0.001 mD to over 0.10 mD. The development of this field began
in 1960s on 320-acre well spacing, with subsequent infill drilling on 160 and 80-acre spacing.
Later, the 40-acre spacing was granted for the majority of the field in 1995.
The production and geological studies of the Ozona Field24-25, 41-42 show limited sand
continuity among wells and large variety in sand qualities over short distances. Therefore,
well interference was not expected in the majority of the field. The large number of existing
wells and the compartmentalized nature of the sands precluded detailed reservoir analysis to
determine the infill drilling potential in the Ozona field.
Voneiff, et al.41 applied the moving window technique first to determine the infill drilling
potentials in the Ozona field. The results of their study identified 1,246 infill candidates
representing 18 billion m3 of additional reserves in the field. Using this method, not only were
they able to quantify the number of infill wells and infill reserves, but they were also able to
identify the location of the infill wells in a short time frame.
Beside the applications in the Ozone field, the moving window technique also has been
successfully applied to Cotton Valley in east Texas,40 Milk River formation in Western Canada
Basin,43-44 Mesaverde formation in the San Juan Basin,44 Morrow formation in Permian
Basin,44 and Austin Chalk45 to quantify infill drilling potentials.
Discussion
Guan, et al.46 have systematically evaluated the accuracy of the moving window technique
and they concluded that this technique can accurately predict infill well performance for a
group of infill candidates, often to within 10%. However, predicted infill potential for individual
wells can be off by more than +/-50%. The method can predict average infill well performance
reasonably well even when well productivity has decreased significantly due to depletion. At
the same time, the accuracy of predicted infill well performance, for either individual wells or
the average of a group of wells, decreases as heterogeneity increases. Moreover, the
accuracy of predicted average infill well performance increases as the number of wells in the
project increases.
Guan, et al. 47-48 also found that larger errors usually occur in sparsely drilled regions of the
reservoir. When the number of wells in a particular window is inadequate, the moving domain
technique defaults to a regional or global correlation, instead of a local correlation. A regional
or global correlation obviously will not predict local performance as accurately as a local
correlation. At the same time, the fast method is based on analysis of well locations and
production data; thus, if no wells are drilled in local regions of high permeability, the fast
method will not be able to predict higher infill performance for the particular area.
It appears that the fast method performs well in predicting the average infill well performance
for a group of wells. So we should examine the infill-drilling program for groups of wells when
we use this technology to evaluate infill-drilling potential. When we use this technology, we
can divide a basin or field into smaller areas and predict the distributions of infill performance
as a group for the smaller areas, rather than individual wells.
Based on the previous studies results we suggest using this fast method as an infill-screening
tool in the tight-gas basins consisting of thousands of wells. In this case, it is almost
impossible to conduct conventional reservoir studies while the moving domain technique can
be used to evaluate an entire basin in a matter of man-days. The result of this technique can
tell petroleum engineers what areas need to put more efforts in further studies.
Methodology
This rapid inversion method uses Modified Generalized Pulse-Spectrum Technique (MGPST)
to calculate sensitivity coefficients. The MGPST was first proposed by Chu et al.50 by using
the basic ideas of Tang et al.51 and it produces the sensitivity coefficients in one simulation
run. However, the linear system to be solved depends on the number of wells as opposed to
the number of parameters. Since the number of wells is usually much less than the number of
grid blocks, therefore, the MGPST is very efficient.
Since the rapid inversion method is simulation-based, all the data required to initialize a
reservoir simulator (e.g. reservoir property distributions, PVT properties, reservoir pressure)
are required to apply the method. However, since the goal of this method is rapid,
approximate estimation of infill potential, this approach does not conduct a detailed reservoir
characterization study. Instead, in an initial application, it simply uses whatever data are
available. For example, reservoir property maps are used if they are available; otherwise, the
model is initialized with uniform average values.
This use of reservoir simulation inversion technology in Gao and McVays method differs from
typical application of reservoir simulation in the scale of application. Since the goal of this
method is to determine infill or recompletion potential over large areas and for large number
of wells, often at scales exceeding individual reservoirs, the large-scale, coarse-resolution
permeability fields are determined rather than small-scale, fine-resolution property fields used
in conventional studies of individual reservoirs. Another difference of this proposed inversion
approach from conventional reservoir study is that instead of producing at historical rates and
matching on pressure, this approach produces wells in the simulation at estimated flowing
bottom-hole pressure and match on production data. This is because the method primarily
relies on readily available well location and production data.
This rapid inversion method uses Modified Generalized Pulse-Spectrum Technique (MGPST)
to calculate sensitivity coefficients. The MGPST was first proposed by Chu et al.50 by using
the basic ideas of Tang et al.51 and it produces the sensitivity coefficients in one simulation
run. In MGPST, the linear system to be solved depends on the number of wells as opposed to
the number of parameters such as Gradient Simulator method49. Therefore, for large field
case with large number of parameters, the MGPST is more efficient.
Application
The rapid inversion method has been applied in an actual production data from the 9township area from a large gas basin in the North America.49 The study field is a shallow gas
reservoir with approximately 42 years of production history and there are approximately 201
wells with production through 1/31/2004.
Using the estimated permeability distribution obtained by history matching production data
through 12/31/2000, reservoir performance was forecasted through 1/31/2004. There were 49
new wells that began production during this 3-year period. Figures 2 shows field-wide
predicted performance for infill wells, those wells first produced after 2001 and close to
existing wells.
20
18
16
14
cal
obs
12
10
8
6
4
2
0
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
Decimal year
Figure 2. Predicted field cumulative production for 34 infill wells.49
The results in the above field case application showed that in areas with existing wells with
sufficient production data to quantify reservoir quality, the proposed method can accurately
predict the production potential of groups of infill wells.
Discussion
It is shows in their paper49 apparent that performance was predicted more accurately for infill
wells than step-out wells. This is because the infill wells benefit from the more accurate
permeability distribution resulting from the production influence of nearby existing wells.
Since the method is based primarily on well locations and production data for a rapid
screening evaluation, predictions for individual well locations can possess significant error,
particularly for step-out wells or in areas without sufficient production data. Predictions for
step-out wells or in areas with insufficient production can be improved only by including other
types of data, e.g. seismic data.
Conclusions
This paper reviewed the infill drilling experiences as it is found in the open literature and
summarized what petroleum engineers have learned during the past 20 + years on field infill
drilling projects. Both onshore and offshore infill drilling projects have been included in this
paper. Various success and failure infill drilling cases are presented, which will help operators
to develop operational and design strategies for current and future infill drilling projects.
This paper also discussed two recently developed fast methods, moving window technique
and rapid inversion method, to determine infill drilling potentials in large, mature, tight
hydrocarbon basins. Both methods are primarily based only on the well locations and
production data, which are widely available in the field, and both can accurately predict infill
potentials for groups of infill candidates.
References
1. Driscoll, V.J., Recovery Optimization Through Infill Drilling Concepts, Analysis, and Field Results,
paper SPE 4977 presented at the 49th Annual Meeting of the Society of Petroleum Engineers of
AIME, Houston, TX, October 6-9, 1974.
2. Gould, T.L., and Munoz, M.A., An Analysis of Infill Drilling, paper SPE 11021 presented at the 57th
Annual Fall Technical Conference and Exhibition of the Society of Petroleum Engineers of AIME,
New Orleans, Louisiana, September 26-29, 1982.