Evaluation of Infill Drilling Opportunities in Lekhwair Field, Oman

Abstract This paper presents an evaluation of infill drilling opportunities in a mature waterflood. Different infill drilling configurations for increased oil recovery are compared using a ranking scheme. The field has been on production since 1976. The field has a complex development history, with periods of primary recovery, shut-in, 5-spot, inverted 9-spot, and direct line-drive waterflood. The field is currently undergoing a linedrive waterflood. The challenge is to find new infill drilling opportunities and determine optimal well spacing to maximize oil production. Traditional infill drilling evaluations either use empirical techniques based on ad-hoc esimates of drainage areas or reservoir simulation of the field-level benefits of an infill drilling program. The former approach ignores the impact of reservoir heterogeneities while the latter approach makes it difficult to evaluate the contribution that each infill well makes to the field-level benefit. Our approach isolates the impact of each infill well and provides a fast and novel methodology to evaluate the incremental benefit while accounting for reservoir heterogeneity, well conditions, pattern configuration, injection rates, and voidage replacement ratio. This type of analysis helps optimize the number of wells to be drilled and at the same time leads to increased oil recovery through better waterflood management. Streamline analysis was used to identify dead spots and regions of unswept oil in a part of the field. A novel waterflood management workflow was used to evaluate new infill well configuration strategies to increase oil recovery and better manage the waterflood. Optimization studies were also conducted to minimize the number of wells with the right combination of injectors and producers and obtain significant incremental benefits. Work is underway in the field to implement these recommendations and early results point to the success of this approach. This paper presents a novel approach for evaluating the impact of infill drilling. The marginal utility of each infill well is calculated and then is used to optimize the number of wells and maximize oil recovery. The approach presented can be used to quantify the impact of infill drilling and increase oil rate and recovery in similar reservoirs.