An Integrated Well-Reservoir Steam Injection Modelling for Steam Injection Optimization

The limitation of Steam Injection to depths has been a subject of concern in the application of Steam Injection for heavy and extra heavy oil recovery. This is usually as a result of the complex mechanism of heat loses occurring in the wellbore and consequently the heat loss distribution in the reservoir. A conventional approach to the optimization of steam injection has been based on isolated analysis of the well system aimed at maintaining adequate steam quality at the sandface at optimal injection rate, pressure, temperature and overall heat transfer coefficient. This often results to total neglect of the effect of the interaction between the well system and the reservoir system in the Model results. This research presents an integrated approach in the modelling of steam injection project that incorporates both the well system and the reservoir system. In this study, a three case-study wells were analyzed which are located at INJ1 (1, 1), PROD1 (5, 5) and PROD2 (9, 1) respectively. The results of the findings reveals that the conventional practice of maintaining sufficient SQ at the sandface is not the last optimization strategy in real field scenario. This is because the efficiency of the heavy oil displacement by the steam is a co-function of the effective SQ at the sandface, the FHLR/FHLT and the relative distance of the injector(s) from the producer(s) which are characterized by the thermal properties of the reservoirs. As part of the objectives of this study, a novel numerical approach using PROSPER wellbore simulator is presented for analysing the impact of reservoir back pressure on the estimated SQ. The results as presented in the work shows that wrong estimations of downhole SQ can result from the total neglect of Reservoir Pressure especially in relatively deeper wells.