Methodology of Selecting Pilot Development Areas for Application of BrightWater™ Technology

At present, development of unique and reserves-rich fields is characterized by declining oil production rates and increasing portion of residual recoverable reserves in reservoirs with high current watercut. Conventional tools to recover such reserves are rather inefficient. Therefore, application of flow-diverging techniques of enhancing oil recovery is becoming more and more important. In the recent time, there has been a growing interest to a new EOR technology BrightWaterТМ. Since 2004, the commercial use of this method has expanded from single pilot applications to several dozens of wells, and has been implemented at oil fields in Alaska, Argentina, Azerbaijan, Brazil etc. The key feature of this technology, which makes it different from its analogs, is the formation of a barrier diverging the flow of water within the formation rather than in the bottomhole area. To select the most appropriate areas at the Company’s oilfields and test BrightWaterТМ technology, a number of fields have been assessed and analyzed for feasibility of such application. This paper describes the main criteria of applying BrightWaterТМ technology and the algorithm of selecting pilot development areas for this purpose.