Some Keys to Successful Gas Flood Design

General:
Characterize the reservoir fully using all available data (e.g. cores, well rates and pressures, logs
including RFTs, seismic, cores). This is the most critical step and must be continuously updated
as wells are drilled. You must identify compartments and layering to properly place injection and
production wells and to identify conformance control measures, e.g. perforation location, polymer
gels.
Consider the lifetime of the reservoir at discovery. How will primary recovery affect secondary
and tertiary recovery? Can water flooding be done immediately? What is the plan for EOR?
Obtain necessary petrophysical and fluid data at field discovery that could be useful for secondary
and tertiary processes. For example, good PVT data based on a detailed component analysis is
important at this stage. Fluid compositions can change vertically and horizontally, sometimes
indicating different compartments within the reservoir. Fluid compositions can also change during
primary and secondary recovery.
Examine analogue fields in the area and how they have been developed.
Consider guidelines to determine which EOR processes are possible based on technical and
economic considerations.
Determine the quality of the water to be injected and from what source, e.g. produced water, sea
water, salinity, temperature, filtered.
Estimate the well spacing and pattern for maximum recovery based on cumulative incremental
recovery divided by number of wells (approximates CAPEX) and also on the cumulative volume
of fluid injected divided by the bbls of oil recovered (approximates OPEX).
Consider doing a pilot to learn more about your field. A pilot also trains the field personnel on the
planned technology.
Miscible Gas Flooding:
Determine potential fluids that can be injected based on availability and cost effectiveness (you
may want to sell components like propane). Is CO2 available nearby either from source rock or
from flue gas? Is a pipeline nearby?
Obtain reliable PVT data including swelling and multicontact data for a variety of possible
injection fluids. Consider that pure fluids injected initially will become contaminated with
produced fluids as time progresses. Do three phases form and in what temperature and pressure
range? Asphaltenes?
Determine the fluid/rock wettability. What is the spreading coefficient when gas is injected? Will
gravity drainage occur? How does wettability affect residual oil saturation.
Perform experiments to identify the amount of gas trapped by the WAG process, and its effect on
gas and water relative permeability. Measure solvent relative permeability.
Tune a cubic EOS such as Peng-Robinson based on the MMP, swelling test data, slim-tube
experiments, and other available PVT data. One good source on how to tune is outlined in
Pedersen and Christensen (2007).
Determine MMP for potential injection fluids using a variety of methods, i.e. slim tube
experiments, 1D simulations, mixing cell, UTPVT MOC or PVTSIM MOC. Do you need to
inject water first to increase reservoir pressure? Must you include enriched components such as
ethane and propane? Develop a MMP model as a function of gas composition (see paper in
CDROM for example). What is the displacement type (C, V, or CV)?
Examine the sensitivity of displacement efficiency to reservoir mixing of fluids by performing 1D
simulations with varying grid block sizes. What pressure must be maintained for good

displacement efficiency? Should the pressure be higher than the MMP to compensate for
reservoir mixing? (see paper in CDROM on how to estimate level of mixing between wells). Use
the appropriate grid-block size to mimic the level of mixing for your field (if possible).
Determine for your reservoir the importance of gravity and channeling on sweep efficiency. How
should WAG be done to lessen thief zones (number of cycles, WAG ratio, slug size)? What are
the densities and viscosities of the fluids injected compared to the reservoir oil? What is your
flow regime?
Perform field, block (sector), or pattern scale compositional simulations to examine various well
scenarios. Start with 2D vertical and horizontal crossections and then do 3D simulations over a
portion of the reservoir. Can gravity be used beneficially?