A novel approach in extracting predictive information from water-oil ratio for enhanced water production mechanism diagnosis
Minou Rabiei A , Ritu Gupta A , Yaw Peng Cheong B and Gerardo A. Sanchez Soto BA Curtin University of Technology
B CSIRO Earth Science and Resource Engineering
The APPEA Journal 50(1) 567-580 https://doi.org/10.1071/AJ09034
Published: 2010
Abstract
Despite the advances in water shutoff technologies, the lack of an efficient diagnostic technique to identify excess water production mechanisms in oil wells is preventing these technologies being applied to deliver the desired results, which costs oil companies a lot of time and money.
This paper presents a novel integrated approach for diagnosing water production mechanisms by extracting hidden predictive information from water-oil ratio (WOR) graphs and integrating it with static reservoir parameters. Two common types of excess water production mechanism (coning and channelling) were simulated where a wide range of cases were generated by varying a number of reservoir parameters. Plots of WOR against oil recovery factor were used to extract the key features of the WOR data. Tree-based ensemble classifiers were then applied to integrate these features with the reservoir parameters and build classification models for predicting the water production mechanism.
Our results show high rates of prediction accuracy for the range of WOR variables and reservoir parameters explored, which demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed ensemble classifiers. Proactive water control procedures based on proper diagnosis obtained by the proposed technique would greatly optimise oil productivity and reduce the environmental impacts of the unwanted water.
Minou Rabiei is a PhD student at Curtin University of Technology doing research in applied computing and statistics in excess water production problems in vertical oil wells. She completed a BSc at Tehran Amir Kabir University in 1998 and an MSc at London South Bank University in 2002. Her research interests are in the application of statistics and information technology in petroleum engineering. Member: SPE. Minou.rabiei@postgrad.curtin.edu.au |
Ritu Gupta is a senior lecturer in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Curtin University of Technology. She obtained a Masters degree in 1989, followed by PhD in 1994, all in the area of statistics from Delhi University, India. She has worked in range of academic and consulting positions, first as lecturer in Delhi University, then as a research officer at the statistical consulting unit, University of Western Australia, and finally joined Curtin University of Technology in 2000. Ritu has written more than 30 consulting reports for various government departments and industries in Australia. She has presented at several international conferences, and has published papers in refereed journals. Over the past decade she has worked on developing statistical methods for efficient reserves estimation in petroleum engineering applications. This work has resulted in over 15 research papers, two PhD supervisions and software development. Accredited member: Statistical Society of Australia. R.gupta@curtin.edu.au |
Yaw Peng Cheong is a reservoir engineer at CSIRO petroleum and geothermal research portfolio, carrying out reservoir simulation studies. Previously, he worked as a reservoir engineer at Sirikit oilfield, PTTEP Thailand and at Roxar, Malaysia, completing some consulting projects and technical support for static reservoir modelling and dynamic simulation software packages. Cheong has a PhD in petroleum engineering from Curtin University of Technology (2005), studying the experimental design and analysis methods in reservoir uncertainty studies. Before that, he completed a MSc in petroleum geoscience and a BSc in geology. Member: SPE. Yawpeng.cheong@csiro.au |
Gerardo A. Sanchez Soto is a chemical engineer with a Masters degree (at ULA University, Venezuela) and PhD in chemical engineering (Birmingham University, UK). Gerardo worked in the production department of PDVSA-Intevep for 14 years. Gerardo has been involved in research areas such as: interfacial physical-chemistry associated to bitumen in water emulsions and two/three phases fluids, mixing technology and scale up processes, oil dehydration, drilling fluids and others aspects of drilling technology. Gerardo joined CSIRO in 2005 working on a software tool to automatically link reservoir and hydraulic commercial simulators. In 2007 he became subsea and well technologies stream leader supervising technically six research projects and working directly in hydrates in flow assurance, compact separation and relative permeability modifiers projects. He has produced 20 confidential reports, five papers and has been a co-author of seven patents in Intevep and one in CSIRO. Gerardo.sanchezsoto@csiro.au |
