Optimizing oil recovery factor by horizontal and vertical infill drilling using streamline simulation in an Iranian oil reservoir

Abstract

Although nowadays finite difference simulators have many advantages for reservoir engineers to predict reservoirs in three dimensions, they have some disadvantages, such as spending much run time for complex fields with several thousand grids, which – by using streamline simulation – the run time was decreased considerably. In this paper, first a brief summary of streamline simulation and its uniqueness applications were discussed and then an Iranian oil reservoir as a case study was simulated by using FrontSim streamline simulator. Then, besides testing the results of Sayyafzadeh et al. (2010) to find the location of infill wells, the most suitable locations for infill drilling were selected. After that, vertical and horizontal infill wells were investigated and overall 34 scenarios were tested by using the streamline simulation method and FrontSim software. Finally the results of simulation and testing infill drilling scenario show significant increase in field oil production and field oil recovery factor, approximately 13%, and also a reduction in field water cut. In addition, distinguishing fractures or faults, well’s drainage area, and understanding how much injectors affect the field oil production are some of the other benefits of the streamline simulation method. The novelty of this paper was to study the effects of horizontal infill wells and to compare the results between horizontal and vertical infill drilling using streamline simulation.