Browsing by Subject "Horizontal oil well drilling"
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Item Finite difference modeling of oil recovery by waterflooding using horizontal well injectors(Texas Tech University, 1998-12) Faruqi, Sohail ArshedWaterflooding is the most commonly used injection method for secondary recovery of oil reservoirs. The selection of a horizontal well or a vertical well as an injector is an important issue in waterflooding because these two types of wells can behave differently due to their orientation in the reservoir. Horizontal wells, due to their geometry, possess great apparent potential in injection processes because these wells have large contact with the formation as compared to the vertical wells. The performance of vertical well injectors in waterflooding an oil reservoir have been extensively investigated and reported in the literature. The detailed analysis of the performance of horizontal well injectors, on the other hand, is not found in the literature. The objective of this research was to investigate the potential of horizontal well injectors in waterflood operation with the help of a reservoir simulator. A two-phase, black oil model was developed in this research to study the potential of horizontal well injectors in waterflooding. The results showed that vertical to horizontal permeability ratio and formation thickness are the two main factors that can affect the performance of a horizontal well injector as compared to a vertical well injector. As the vertical to horizontal permeability ratio decreases, the advantage of a horizontal well injector over a vertical well injector decreases. This change in the permeability ratio does not have any significant effect on the performance of a vertical well injector. Also, the smaller the formation thickness, the better the performance of the horizontal well injectors.Item Mathematical simulation of horizontal well performance in naturally fractured rock formations(Texas Tech University, 1998-12) Khan, Farid UddinThe purpose of horizontal drilling is to increase the well contact area with the formation, thereby enhancing production and injection. Application of horizontal wells in naturally fractured reservoirs has proven to be highly successful. In this study a dual-porosity, oil-water black oil simulator is developed and used to predict the performance of a horizontal well in fractured reservoirs. To avoid problems associated with discontinuous properties within the matrix and fracture system a fully implicit formulation is used to develop the flow equations. Point Successive Over Relaxation iterative method is successfully applied to solve the fully implicit system of equations for a dual porosity fractured reservoir. The model results were verified with volumetric calculations, analytic solution, and a dual porosity example. The matrix fracture transfer term is derived and found to be different from conventional expressions. It is seen that when a horizontal producer intersects high permeability vertical fractures more oil can be recovered which cannot be achieved by vertical wells. Hence application of horizontal wells can be very successful in formations having higher density of vertical fractures. Recovery has been found to be significantly sensitive to matrix water-oil relative permeability and capillary pressure but similar properties of the fracture system has much less effect.