Improvement of Water Flood Performance in NEAG-1 Field in the Egyptian Western Desert

Abstract

NEAG-1 Field is located in the northern part of the Western Desert in Egypt. Bahariya, the main reservoir, consists of a sequence of thin bedded sandstone with poor lateral extensions. The reservoir heterogeneity is a bit high that the reservoir permeability variation is 0.8 and the reservoir complexity factor is 3.6 (out of 5) so, it is classified as a challenging reservoir. In 2010, the waterflood project has started and the strategy was to adopt a commingle injection and commingle production for all wells. Later on, production and pressure performance proved a high level of heterogeneity and indicated that there are five different flow units in Bahariya which makes numerical prediction and modeling very unlikely. So, this field is better to run and monitor analytically. The decision has been taken to build a tool for waterflood performance monitoring. The first step of the work is to have one database file from different data sources. The second part of this study is to define diagnostic plots that fit NEAG-1 wells, reservoirs and field characters. So, we can have a simple tool that contains all kinds of data and plots for waterflooding monitoring and troubleshooting. It is easy to be updated in daily bases and any one can access and use it from wherever. As a part of the quality control (QC) process, this tool has been developed and validated for NEAG-1 Field with a high accuracy compared to reservoir simulation runs. The results are promising, that the tool has been implemented for three different cases; assisted in Fadl-10 WI workover decisions which saved 0.65 MM$ and added 100 MSTB as an incremental oil reserve. Control of water production which reduced Fadl-1 water cut from 75 to 62% and increased oil production rate by 200 bbl/day. This assisted well planning which helped drill Fadl-47 oil producer with an oil production rate of 500 bpd. In addition to assisting decisions for remedial actions, the tool maximized oil production and optimized the operating cost for lots of cases. The proposed tool can be modified also to fit different fields with different reservoir characters.