High-pressure capacity expansion and water injection mechanism and indicator curve model for fractured-vuggy carbonate reservoirs

Abstract

Water injection for oil displacement is one of the most effective ways to develop fractured-vuggy carbonate reservoirs. With the increase in the number of rounds of water injection, the development effect gradually fails. The emergence of high-pressure capacity expansion and water injection technology allows increased production from old wells. Although high-pressure capacity expansion and water injection technology has been implemented in practice for nearly 10 years in fractured-vuggy reservoirs, its mechanism remains unclear, and the water injection curve is not apparent. In the past, evaluating its effect could only be done by measuring the injection-production volume. In this study, we analyze the mechanism of high-pressure capacity expansion and water injection. We propose a fluid exchange index for high-pressure capacity expansion and water injection and establish a discrete model suitable for high-pressure capacity expansion and water injection curves in fractured-vuggy reservoirs. We propose the following mechanisms: replenishing energy, increasing energy, replacing energy, and releasing energy. The above mechanisms can be identified by the high-pressure capacity expansion and water injection curve of the well HA6X in the Halahatang Oilfield in the Tarim Basin. By solving the basic model, the relative errors of Reservoirs I and II are found to be 1.9% and 1.5%, respectively, and the application of field examples demonstrates that our proposed high-pressure capacity expansion and water injection indicator curve is reasonable and reliable. This research can provide theoretical support for high-pressure capacity expansion and water injection technology in fracture-vuggy carbonate reservoirs.

Keywords

Fractured-vuggy carbonate reservoirs / High-pressure capacity expansion and water injection / Mechanism / Water injection indicator curve

Credit author statement

Lixin Chen: Project administration, Funding acquisition, Supervision; Chengao Jia: Supervision; Rujie Zhang: Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically writing the initial draft (including substantive translation); Ping Yue: Oversight and leadership responsibility for the research activity planning and execution, including mentorship external to the core team, establishment and solution of the mathematical model; Xujian Jiang, Junfang Wang, Zhou Su, Yun Xiao: Provide field data, supervision, investigation; Yuan Lv: Software, establishment and solution of the mathematical model.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (No. M2019650965), Major R & D Plan of Sichuan Province (No. 2020YFQ0034) and the National Natural Science Fund Projects (Grant No. 51804253).

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