Posible improvement of waterflood?!? 1

[ppata]

Hi,

Probably I came again with one of my strange ideeas. One of the reservoirs I work on (as reservoir engineer) produce a high quantity of water with phenols. We want to inject that water to obtain an waterflood, but we have some problems with the enviromental agency.
My question is verry simple:
Can we find a chemical assistance in order to give a proof to enviromental agency that those phenols might bring us a better wateflooding efect.
Please give me anything on the effect of phenols in oil reservoirs(good or bad things)

Best regards,
Andrei

 

[DrillerNic]

Produced water reinjection is a well established method of dealing with produced water and helping the overall recovery. The main problem with PWRI is that slow loss of injectivity is often seen in PWRI wells due to the sandface gradually being plugged by the small amounts of oil (or oil emulsion) in the the produced water. One way around this is to operate the injection wells above the fracture pressure (ie fracture the formation and inject into the fractures). This is often not a good idea as you may be injecting into layers you don't want to inject into. These might be the things that the environmental agency is concerned about.

If you don't reinject the water what will you do with it? In the North Sea we've had a lot of pain due to phenols in the produced water that's disposed overboard (maybe it affects fish, maybe it doesn't...). You could that argument to get the Environmental agency on your side- injecting it back underground with no risk of it contaminating any aquifers and so on.

Finally I don't know of the effects of Phenol on EOR processess....there's an SPE meeting on Chemical EOR in Aberdeen next week- I'll see if phenols are one of the chemicals mentioned. Why don't you have a look through SPE papers and see if there's anything there concerning phenols in EOR?

 

[ppata]

DrillerNic,
The biggest problem is the water treatment (too expensive), and I try to find a way to avoid it with respect to enviromental rules. I also hope that Ms. Sara Thomas have an answer on that problem. Keep in touch.

Best regards,
Andrei

 

[DrillerNic]

PPata- From what you've said, I'd sugggest that unless phenols in the produced water stream are very bad in some way when you reinject them into the reservoir you go down the PWRI route to dispose of the water. Provided you do all the engineering work ususally done for PWRI (and there are lots of SPE papers and stuff on the internet on PWRI), I'm sure you could justify PWRI on safe disposal of contaminated produced water; no requirement for fresh water supply for water flood; increased oil production due to water flood/ pressure maintenance etc.