Simulation of formation damage after long term water flooding

Abstract

Water flooding is a commonly used technology for enhancing oil recovery. Its mechanism is to maintain higher pressure in reservoir and to sweep the oil from the reservoir and push it towards production wells. However the strong water flooding will cause higher compression pressure around the injection wellbore. This high pressure in the reservoir causes stress redistribution and higher stress near the wellbore which induces material damage and permeability change. We developed a fluid-solid coupling finite element model to simulate and quantitatively analyze the pressure evolution in the reservoir as well as damage and permeability change in the formation during long term water flooding process. The obtained results offer theoretical understanding on the benefits (pore pressure increase in the simulation domain), rock damage, permeability change of long term water flooding and the insights of how to detect and prevent wellbore failure and collapse due to water flooding. Copyright 2012, Society of Petroleum Engineers.