Feasibility Study of Hot Waterflooding Technique to Enhance Heavy Oil Recovery: Investigation of the Effect of Well Spacing, Horizontal Well Configuration and Injection Parameters
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Among several oil recovery techniques, hot waterflooding through thermal displacement processes could potentially increase oil recovery by decreasing oil viscosity, thus decreasing the mobility ratio at a relatively low cost compared to other thermal methods such as SAGD or in-situ combustion. These methods can also be applied in specific in-situ conditions such as formation sensitivity to fresh water. This paper examines the performance and feasibility of hot waterflooding and compares the performance with a conventional recovery scheme of a heavy oil reservoir with an oil gravity of 10.6 °API and viscosity of 13,400 mPa‧s (at 22 °C) from the Lloydminster area (Canada); the approach includes numerical thermal simulation and economical analysis of each process. First, the performance of a hot waterflood on a generic model consisting of a 5-spot injection pattern was investigated. Then four field designs were recognized from several previously analyzed patterns. The effect of well spacing, horizontal well configuration, injection parameters, as well as the impact of incremental temperature adjustment of waterflood on heavy oil recovery were studied. More than 220 models were built on the final patterns and the most economic configuration was found to have four horizontal producers and four horizontal injectors with a well spacing of 67 m. This arrangement resulted in a recovery factor of more than 30 % of the oil originally in place (OOIP). The most economic injection rate was determined to be 400 m3/day of water at optimum injection temperature of 80 °C. It was also observed that by increasing the temperature of the injected water, the oil viscosity could be reduced to less than 100 mPa‧s. This improved the oil recovery and production rate, delayed injection breakthrough, and reduced water cut. From the results, the highest injection temperature of 100 °C could be recommended; however, the incremental oil versus the amount of heat and facilities required would not be justifiable from an economic point of view.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".