A Comparative Study of Oil Recovery by Waterflooding of Different Stratified Reservoir System under Contrasting Flow Regimes Wycliff Kawule

Department of Geology & Petroleum Studies, Makerere University Correspondence: wkawule@sci.mak.ac.ug, wkawule@yahoo.com

Abstract
Multiphase fluid flow through a porous medium and ultimately, oil recovery are greatly governed by capillary, viscous and gravity forces. These three forces are themselves influenced by several factors including fluid and reservoir rock properties as well as design parameters. Therefore, gaining a better understanding of these factors and how they affect the three force terms is believed to be a positive step towards achieving satisfactory oil recovery rates. This study compares waterflooding performance of different stratified reservoir systems under varying flow regimes. The performance is based on the oil recovery factor registered by each reservoir system after injecting 0.25 and 0.75 pore volumes. Several studies have shown that each of the three force terms is a strong function of injection flow rate, water viscosity, fluid density difference, interfacial tension (IFT) and length of the porous medium. Many of such studies employ conventional dimensionless numbers to investigate the effects of capillary, viscous and gravity forces on oil recovery. Accordingly, this study adopted a methodology that involved simulating waterflooding through different stratified reservoir systems where one or two of the aforementioned force terms dominated the displacement process. Numerous simulations were run using IMEX reservoir simulator for different values of injection flow rate (300, 750 and 1000 STB/day), water viscosity (0.35, 0.734 and 2 mPa.s) and oil-water IFT (0.005, 0.5 and 50 mN/m). For each simulation, the force term(s) and hence the flow regime dominating the water-oil displacement process was determined basing on computed conventional capillary and Bond numbers. A direct line drive well pattern, consisting of one injector and one producer was adopted for the study. The injection well was operated under maximum BHP and injection rate to avoid exceeding the formation fracture pressure. Conversely, the production well was operated under a minimum BHP constraint to avert the introduction of free gas in the system. Reservoir heterogeneity was modeled by assigning different permeability values to the different layers of the stratified reservoir grid block. Permeability variability of the modeled stratified reservoir was defined by a of 0.543. Simulation results showed that waterflooding performance of a stratified reservoir was sensitive to both heterogeneity and gravity segregation. The results also revealed a perfect agreement between the waterflooding performance of the uniform reservoir system and that of the heterogeneous stratified

reservoir with a coarsening upwards sequence when vertical communication between adjacent layers was allowed. A perfect match was also observed between the waterflooding performance of the reservoir with a coarsening upwards sequence and that with a downward coarsening sequence for the no crossflow condition. This was the case, particularly for all simulations run under negligible capillary pressure. The highest oil recovery factors were achieved when water was flooded through a uniform reservoir system and the one with a coarsening upwards sequence in the presence of crossflow.