When Water Means Oil: Block 16 Case History

摘要

In heavy oil reservoirs with strong water drive, oil production with high water rates is expected. Block 16, located in the Ecuadorian rainforest, is not an exception. Currently Block 16 has an average oil production of 50,000 bopd (15° API mixture) with 940,000 bwpd. As the oil production rate declines, produced water increases and adjustments on the water handling systems must be made in order to ensure a safe and efficient process. The purpose of this paper is to present an overview of the challenges that implies the water handling management on such a sensitive and changing environment, placing a particular focus on the modeling and simulation techniques employed to optimize the injection ssytem. In order to predict and improve the disposal water management, an integrated water handling model for the southern area of the block was bui this model includes all pumping stages (booster, medium and high pressure), an extensive pipeline network and the 21 water disposal wells. The model helps to identify bottlenecks, overloaded equipment and the best equipment repositioning strategy to improve energy consumption. Once the model was ready, several simulations were ran, and they were useful to identify that the main issues to increase the water handling capacity were not about surface equipment, but the disposal wells' capacity. This helped to redefine the water handling investment strategy, pointing towards to improve wells' disposal capacity rather than investing on surface equipment upgrades. As the main conclusion, the study lead to identify the need of a scientific approach to characterize the water handling processes taking into account all the systems involved, rather than the single well to well traditional analysis.