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Use Of Subsea Technologies For Produced Water Management In Mature Offshore Fields Using Integrated Asset Modeling
- Publisher: European Association of Geoscientists & Engineers
- Source: Conference Proceedings, ECMOR XVI - 16th European Conference on the Mathematics of Oil Recovery, Sep 2018, Volume 2018, p.1 - 24
Abstract
Summary
The results of the created methodology for evaluating the economic viability of installing subsea technologies for Oil-Water (O-W) Separation and Produced Water Re-Injection (PWRI) in mature offshore fields as a solution for water production management by using Integrated Asset Modeling (IAM) are presented. The methodology was tested in the benchmark case UNISIM-I-D showing excellent results, nevertheless, its application can be extensible to any other field where the installation of this kind of subsea systems is being analyzed.
Through the explicit coupling of specialized simulators of reservoir, multiphase flow in the tubing, production network, and economic modeling is possible both forecasting the production behavior of the field and generating the economic scenarios in a more realistic manner when the complex subsea systems are included to the production network. The equipment modeled consists of a subsea O-W separator located at the producer wellhead and a subsea pump that directly re-injects the separated water to the injector wellhead. Although the model has some simplifications, it permitted evaluating the implementation from a reservoir engineering perspective and knowing the production response without losing the representativeness of phenomena occurring in the field.
Besides being an economically attractive solution, it is also environmentally friendly because of the water used for injection is the produced water from the wells. Separating the water from the hydrocarbon stream has other additional benefits that favor the oil production from the reservoir and hence, positively influence the Oil Recovery Factor (ORF). For instance, the relief of water-and-liquid capacity of the platform, oil production anticipation associated with high amounts of produced water and decreasing the pressure drop along from the flowline to the platform. In fact, the results obtained from the economic model shows that this solution might be viable due to the revenues anticipation that from another way would not be possible to be earned without considering the implementation of these technologies.
This work can be considered as an interdisciplinary approach where including this kind of subsea technologies in the production network and its influence in the production of the reservoir have to be analyzed from a holistic point of view. Several disciplines as reservoir engineering, production engineering, and economic calculations are involved in building a coupled model that permits analyzing multiple production scenarios and network configurations, determining the best arrangement of the components, evaluating the economic viability of the project and supporting the making-decision process during field management.
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