Through-barrier diagnostics of thief injection and production on mature fields for carbon footprint improvement

Background. Injection and production wells integrity play a key role in energy balance throughout reservoir development especially in mature fields as it becomes challenging to pressure support depleted target reservoirs. A large differential pressure between target and untargeted zones tends to cement integrity failure resulting thief injection and high water cut in oil production wells. This directly impacts water flooding efficiency, production efficiency and indirectly significantly increase carbon footprint during reservoir development of mature field.

Aim. To improve workover efficiency and carbon footprint decrease a way to enhance conventional diagnostics is presented in this work.

Materials and methods. A special approach of production logging called through-barrier diagnostics including passive spectral acoustics and temperature modelling for quantitative analysis of thief injection or production profile is described in this work.

Results. A number of through-barrier diagnostic cases revealing a true source of water in oil wells with high water cut and thief injection in water injectors are presented in the work as well as information on remedials for each case.

Conclusions. This work shows how through-barrier diagnostics helps operators to accurately allocate a reason of high water cut in oil production wells and thief injection geometry in injection wells unlike conventional diagnostics that can only detect water entering the wellbore. In presented cases, through-barrier diagnostics leads to a significant reduction in water volumes and CO₂ emissions, and increased field production.

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