Abstract
Gel treatment has been a cost-effective method to control the conformance of a reservoir with severe heterogeneity problems. The water channels in such reservoirs can be classified as open fractures or high permeability porous media with pore-throat network. Many simulation studies have been conducted to discuss gel treatment performance for conformance control. However, nobody considered the polymer rheology difference in open fractures and porous media in simulation. Previous simulation studies also ignored the residual resistance factor as a function of rock permeability rather than a constant parameter. In this study, a conceptual simulation model was established to simulate the linear flow system for the reservoir with horizontal wells considering the two factors mentioned above. The results demonstrate that the gel treatment always provides the better placement results in the open fracture type channel than pore-throat network type channel. Moreover, it is very necessary to consider residual resistance factor as a function of permeability, which is based on the experimental results and can provide much greater plugging efficiency in the higher permeable channels than constant residual resistance factor. Sensitivity analysis studies and multifactor analysis indicate that increasing oil viscosity and permeability ratio has a strong positive influence on conformance control results, which indicate in-situ gel treatment can be better applied in heavy or viscous oil reservoirs with fracture-like channels. Besides, the results also indicate that in reservoirs with severe channeling problem where channel velocity was high, the differences of gelant placement and profile improvement in models with two different types of channels could be enlarged greatly.
Recommended Citation
J. Leng et al., "Impact of Polymer Rheology on Gel Treatment Performance of Horizontal Wells with Severe Channeling," SPE Journal, vol. 27, no. 2, pp. 1017 - 1035, Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE), Apr 2022.
The definitive version is available at https://doi.org/10.2118/209190-PA
Department(s)
Geosciences and Geological and Petroleum Engineering
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)
1086-055X
Document Type
Article - Journal
Document Version
Final Version
File Type
text
Language(s)
English
Rights
© 2023 Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE), All rights reserved.
Publication Date
01 Apr 2022
Comments
U.S. Department of Energy, Grant DE-FE0031606