Objective
Extremely large amounts of waste water are being produced together with hydrocarbons (oil and gas). Several examples illustrate this situation. Shell predicts total water production of 1 million cubic meters per day in the year 2000. Elf-Aquitaine is already producing one cubic meter of water for each cubic meter of oil. The ratio is even worse for Total: 3m3 of water for lm3 of oil. Water originates mainly from two sources: (1) drive fluids that are injected to enhance oil production and (2) expansion of aquifers connected to producing reservoirs. Excessive water production incurs serious environmental problems due to waste water disposal. It also lowers oil productivity and increases operating costs. European oil companies, service companies and research institutions have set the reduction of water during oil recovery as a major target.
Injection of hydrophilic polymers and gels in production or injection wells is a well-known method of water control. As shown in Figure 1, the action of these products consists of reducing water influx from the high-permeability layers in order to favour oil or gas production from the low-permeability ones. They achieve this result by reducing the water relative permeability with relation to the oil relative permeability. However, the technique has thus far suffered from lack of reliability. The literature reports that less than 45% of near-wellbore gel treatments have been successful (Martin et al., 1991). Moreover, many products currently used contain toxic components (chromium, phenol, etc.), and need thus to be replaced with more environmentally benign substitutes. Although the polymer injection process consists of simple injection of a limited volume of chemicals, the control (and thus the success) of the treatment requires the combination of several areas of expertise.
The purpose of this project is to improve the effectiveness of gel treatments and to develop new environmentally-acceptable polymer gel systems. The project consists of three main stages:
1. The first stage concerns the choice and optimisation of two environmentally acceptable polymer gel systems suitable for North Sea reservoir conditions. After establishment of bulk properties (thermodynamics, kinetics and stability), the gelling system properties will be investigated in porous media, to gain a better understanding of the control of gelation and gel strength. Special emphasis will be given to relative permeability effects, which are the basis of system selectivity.
2. The second stage aims at investigating several methods that could provide better control of gel placement around the wellbore. Since the target is North Sea reservoirs (mostly layered sandstones), we will focus on systems that can prevent gel penetration in low-permeability oil-bearing zones and divert the gel to high-permeability water zones. We will focus on polymer near-wellbore rheology, gel formation, diverting agents and viscous pre-flush.
3. The third stage concerns the modelling of the physical processes that are observed in the experiments. A continuous feedback between modelling and experimentation will be maintained. The equations that describe the physical processes will be entered into numerical reservoir simulators to study the efficiency of gel treatment in typical field situations.
The multi-disciplinary character of the WELGEL project, together with the coordination of European cooperation, is certainly one of its strongest points. WELGEL presents many innovative ideas. It brings together all the sources of relevant expertise in Europe and thus creates a virtual centre of European expertise in the area of water shutoff. This is beneficial in terms of the competitiveness of Europe vis-a-vis the rest of the world, and has desirable social and economic impacts. WELGEL is also significant in that it deliberately sets environmental protection as a major priority while improving water shutoff technology.
Interest of industry in this project is demonstrated by the fact that a consortium of oil companies will be established, the members of which will contribute financially to the support of WELGEL. This consortium will be the continuation of an existing consortium on Gel Placement, operated by Partner 2 and supported by eight companies (British Petroleum, Marathon Oil, Norsk Hydro, Saga Petroleum, Shell, SNF Floerger, Statoil and Total).
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- engineering and technology environmental engineering water treatment processes wastewater treatment processes
- natural sciences chemical sciences inorganic chemistry transition metals
- engineering and technology environmental engineering energy and fuels fossil energy petroleum
- natural sciences chemical sciences polymer sciences
- engineering and technology environmental engineering energy and fuels fossil energy natural gas
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Coordinator
2600 GA Delft
Netherlands
The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.