SPE 93631

Enhanced Oil Recovery in East Texas

J.H. Hyatt, SPE, and D.A. Hutchison, ExxonMobil Production Co.

Copyright 2005, Society of Petroleum Engineers Inc.

This paper was prepared for presentation at the 14th SPE Middle East Oil & Gas Show and
Conference held in Bahrain International Exhibition Centre, Bahrain, 1215 March 2005.
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Abstract
This paper describes a working gas injection pilot that is
demonstrating additional oil recovery from a very mature
field. This small, low cost pilot has been very valuable in
understanding and demonstrating commercial viability of this
enhanced oil recovery (EOR) process before larger scale
implementation. After nearly 70 years of water drive
production, this immiscible gas injection process has enabled
conversion from viscous displacement water drive to gravity
stable, film drainage behind an advancing gas front. The
design, implementation and current pilot results are discussed
as well as the role of three dimensional (3-D) geocellular and
flow simulation models. Current full-field implementation
project design efforts based on pilot performance and
learnings are also described.

Introduction
The oil field containing this pilot is a large, fault dependent
closure with a moderately strong water drive producing from
the Lower Cretaceous Albian Paluxy Formation of the East
Texas Basin. Oil quality averages 23 degrees API with a
viscosity of 23 cp at reservoir conditions. Large parts of the
field are marked by excellent reservoir quality fluvial channel
systems. These sand channels predominately fine upward
resulting in lower permeability (10-500 millidarcies) at the top
and margins with considerably higher permeability (2-6
darcies) at the channel bases. Because of the combination of
unfavorable mobility ratio, lower permeability in the upper
part of the channel sands and high oil density, the primary
water drive recovery has been less than 35 percent (%) of
original oil in place (OOIP).

The large volume of unswept oil led to investigation of gas

injection and initiation of the small EOR pilot. The main
benefit of gas injection is the exploitation of gravity drainage
to move the previously bypassed oil down into the high
quality, channel base intervals. Once the oil is at the channel
base, it can be recovered effectively by use of horizontal
wells.
Primary Recovery
The high quality, clastic Paluxy Formation is composed of
fluvial channel sands intercalated with shaly, silty interfluves
and estuarine mudstones. The reservoir interval is over 300
feet thick and was deposited during the transgression of the
Early Cretaceous Seaway over the central North American
continent. The channel sands are of excellent reservoir quality
with a porosity average of 25% and permeability average of
2.2 darcies. Reservoir pressure is maintained by a moderately
strong aquifer. Original reservoir pressure was 1900 psig
(1350 psig current) and has been as low as 900 psig during
peak fluid withdrawal. The oil is very undersaturated with an
original solution gas-oil ratio (GOR) of 10 scf/bbl and a
bubble point of 80 psig. Oil viscosity ranges from 21 to 25
centipoise with an oil density that is 93% of the density of the
formation water. Total dissolved solids in the formation water
average approximately 15,000 parts per million.
Since its discovery in the 1930s, this field has experienced
high water cut production. Because the displacing water has a
much lower viscosity than the oil, the mobility ratio for
production by water drive is a very unfavorable 20. Thus,
viscous displacement by the water is inefficient because of
fingering and underrunning. This situation is worsened by the
complex incised channel geometry. Conforming to this
geometry, the displacing water underruns the oil passing
through the highest quality, basal portion of the sand channels
and subsequently cones up to the perforations in producing
wells. Coning occurs quickly because horizontal and vertical
permeabilities are essentially equal and the oil density is very
close to that of the water. Because of the very small water/oil
density contrast, there is almost no gravity force available to
counteract drawdown and mitigate water coning. This lack of
gravity effect is observable not only from very fast formation
of water cones, but also the extended (1-2 year) time periods
required for water cones to heal and yield lower water cut
production.
The result of this unfavorable viscous
displacement process is that producing wells reach their

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SPE 93631

economic limit after recovering only approximately 35% of

OOIP. Oil that is left in the reservoir is trapped predominately
in the lower quality upper and marginal portions of the sand
channels, as illustrated in Fig. 1.
EOR Concept
The large volume of unswept oil led to the investigation of
non-miscible gas injection as a means of increasing recovery.
Miscible gas injection is not practical because of the low
reservoir pressure.
The predominate benefit from gas
injection is the establishment of a large density contrast
between the injected gas and the oil at reservoir conditions.
This contrast generates large gravity forces which tend to keep
the gas-oil contact flat and cause rapid vertical drainage of
bypassed oil from lower quality sand into higher quality
channel base sand as illustrated in Fig. 2. This drainage also
takes place by a mechanism that is different from viscous
displacement and is often described as film drainage1. Film
drainage in most cases results in both higher effective
permeability to oil at low oil saturations and in lower residual
oil saturations. The tendency of the oil to drain to low
saturations and form a thin film (spread at the gas-water
interface2) on the sand grains can and should be tested by
performing spreading coefficient tests in the lab. Tests run for
this pilot confirmed a favorable spreading coefficient.
When considering this process it is also very important to
recognize that injection of the gas does not provide an
improved mobility ratio. The mobility ratio for viscous
displacement of the oil by gas is very unfavorable; thus, for
the benefits of the gas injection induced oil drainage to be
realized, careful consideration of operating strategies is
necessary to ensure gravity dominated displacement is
maintained. A key element of this strategy is to maintain low
drawdown in producing wells to avoid gas coning. Horizontal
wells placed in the channel base experience very low
drawdown but must be properly drilled and completed to
avoid formation damage and to maintain productivity along
the entirety of their length.
In all cases and for each drawdown value, there will be a final,
minimum oil column thickness below which economic
production without coning and excessive gas production is not
possible. As a result, positioning the producing interval of
wells as close to the bottom of the sand channel as possible is
very important to ensure the maximum volume of reservoir is
drained to low oil saturation.
This process has application even in higher primary recovery
oil fields if the formation has sufficient dip to allow the oil to
move downdip and maintain a stable gas-oil contact. A good
example of this situation is Hawkins Field where gas injection
EOR has been in progress for 15+ years. Hawkins had a high,
60% of OOIP, primary recovery from the Dexter sand.
However, because of the 5-7 degree formation dip, a projected
additional 10% of OOIP is expected utilizing this process.3,4
Monitor wells in the gas invaded region at Hawkins are

showing remaining oil saturation from the film drainage to be

less than 10% of pore volume.
The field which is the subject of this paper has low dip of less
than 2 degrees. However, because of the low primary
recovery, movement of the oil downdip is not necessary for
additional recovery. Additional oil recovery should be
possible simply by moving the oil downwards into the high
quality sand and subsequently managing gas coning during
production. This vertical drainage occurs quickly as the film
drainage gravity force is a function of the sine of the dip
angle. Thus for vertical drainage the sine is maximized at a
value of 1 reflecting a flow dip angle of 90 degrees. This
improves both response time and production rates. However,
as the drainage process progresses (see Figs. 1 and 2), a
portion of the production is supported by flow from the
channel margins, which is constrained by the dip angle of the
channel sides.
Pilot Selection and Design
Initial screening work performed for this field with
mechanistic simulation models gave promising results, which
led to the design of a small gas injection pilot. The objectives
of the pilot included: 1) Calibration of simulation models to
more accurately evaluate recovery potential. 2) Utilization of
cased hole logs to monitor gravity drainage of oil to the base
of the sand channel. 3) Drilling and completion of
horizontals positioned at the base of the channel. 4)
Production of oil from the horizontals while avoiding
excessive gas coning. 5) Maintenance of a stable, local gas
cap in the pilot area with no gas leakage from existing wells or
through the north bounding fault. The pilot involved one
small sand channel positioned at the structural apex of the
field. This location was selected to enable a small, low cost
pilot in which the injected gas would be structurally
constrained to the pilot area. The design of this pilot included
building a sequence stratigraphic framework, analyzing logs
and core and constructing a 3-D geocellular model. Both
single well and areal simulation models were then extracted
from the geocellular model and used to model the recovery
process.
Because gas movement is strongly impacted by the channel
sand geometry, it was recognized at a very early stage that
accurate characterization of the geometry and properties of the
channel was very important. As a result, design of the pilot
began with a detailed sequence stratigraphic study. The study
confirmed the pilot channel was a fining-upward channel fill
complex which, typical of this depositional environment, had
the best reservoir permeability associated with the basal
portion of the channel axial trend.
After completing the sequence stratigraphic framework, the
flooding surfaces and sequence boundaries were used to
develop a 3-D geocellular model. From the log analysis, a
volume shale (Vsh) model was built with directional biasing
to reflect channel geometry. Next, a Vsh/core porosity
transform was used to develop pseudo-porosity recognizing

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SPE 93631

two different facies correlations for the silty and sandy

intervals. This pseudo-porosity was then used to define a
locally varying mean that was used in the stochastic porosity
simulation. Finally, a porosity/permeability transform was
made considering both channel facies and floodplain facies
core porosity -vs.- core permeability correlations. The result
was a 3-D geocellular model with accurate rock properties and
property trends that matched sand depositional geometry.
For the reservoir simulation effort, a portion of the 3-D
geocellular model was extracted. The size of the simulation
model area was constrained to allow quick turnaround of
single and multi-well simulation models constructed to
accurately model gas coning when utilizing either vertical or
horizontal wells. A critical aspect of modeling this recovery
process is performing near wellbore gridding sensitivities to
ensure the models have sufficient detail for accurate coning
simulation.
A top view of the initialized simulation model is shown in Fig.
3. It includes all the production wells that were drilled in the
pilot area, plus a water injector at the left, downdip location to
simulate aquifer influx and a gas injector near the middle of
the model. To simulate primary production, all the production
wells were produced and subsequently shut-in as they reached
the field average individual well economic limit rate. As the
model primary recovery approached 35% of OOIP, only two
wells were left producing and both were very close to the
economic limit. Primary production was terminated at 35%
of OOIP recovery. No individual well history match was
possible as many of the producers were completed in multiple
zones and only lease production was recorded. Accurate
primary recovery (35% of OOIP) was the only match
parameter; however, the two model wells still producing at the
end of primary were also the only two wells continuing to
produce in the field.
After reaching the end of primary production, gas injection
was started in the model and the EOR phase of the simulation
started. Another top view of the model (Fig. 4) shows the
simulation results after three years of gas injection. Gas was
injected into the designated well near the center of the model.
Production occurred from five short horizontal laterals
attached to existing wells (dashed white lines show laterals).
Well management was implemented in the simulation to
reduce production from the horizontals whenever more than a
small amount of free gas was produced and also to adjust the
gas injectors rate to maintain an overall volume balance at
reservoir conditions. Because of the matching of gas injection
with fluid withdrawals on a reservoir volume basis, the gas
remained in the area of the producers with little lateral
spreading.
The reservoir simulation indicated good potential for
additional oil recovery from the pilot sand channel (5% of
OOIP incremental recovery after 3 years and 10+% of OOIP
recovery after 10 years). This was promising, especially
considering the 35 foot average thickness of the pilot channel
is lower than the 55 foot overall average thickness for

channels in the field. Simulation indicated that a pilot length

of 3-5 years would be needed to observe peak production and
stable decline from the horizontal wells.
Pilot Application
The pilot was planned in two phases. The first phase
consisted of converting several wells in the pilot area into
monitor wells so that neutron (gas-liquid contacts) or
carbon/oxygen (oil-low salinity water contacts) logs could be
run. Gas was subsequently injected into one injector during
Phase 1 to allow observation of the gravity drainage process
utilizing the monitor logs. The second phase, which included
drilling and producing horizontal wells, was delayed pending
successful results from the first phase. Preparing the monitor
wells consisted of squeezing off existing perforations and then
cleaning out cement inside the casing to a depth greater than
that of the pilot sand channel. Preparation of the gas injector
included running casing inspection logs to ensure casing
integrity. The injector was perforated across the upper half of
the sand thickness. Fig. 5 is a map of the pilot area showing
the gas injector, monitor wells and paths of the two horizontal
wells.
During Phase 1, methane was injected and monitor logs were
run every 3-4 months to observe gas contact movement and
the extent of gas spreading. Methane was used for the pilot
because of the low volume required, which was not enough to
justify trucking liquid nitrogen or installation of a nitrogen
generating facility. Injecting the gas before drilling the Phase
2 wells involved some risk because there was not an offsetting
volume of fluid removed from the channel. Without the
offsetting fluid volume removal, the resulting pressure
gradient encourages gas movement out of the pilot area.
Calculations indicated that the mobility of the water in the
base of the channels was sufficient to avoid inducement of gas
overrunning. Pilot results confirmed that the gas-oil contact
remained stable while the water moved down the channel to
the other parts of the field to be produced in the existing high
water cut producers.
The downward movement of the gas-oil contact was
monitored for approximately one year. At that point, the
vertical contact movement slowed considerably and the gas
cap began to spread. This change in behavior was interpreted
as an indication that the majority of the remaining fluid
beneath the gas/liquid contact was the less mobile oil. This
indicated the need to move to Phase 2 of the pilot. Phase 1
successfully demonstrated the expected rapid movement of oil
downwards in the channel plus the ability to maintain a stable
gas cap.
Phase 2 of the pilot began with the drilling of two horizontal
wells (first two horizontal wells in field). Because of
problems encountered in other fields while drilling the short
horizontal laterals modeled in the pilot design simulation runs,
the well plans were changed to have fewer but longer
horizontals. The small size of the pilot sand channel offered
only one optimum horizontal well location, which was along

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SPE 93631

the center of the channel base.

To avoid obtaining
performance data from only one horizontal well, another, lessoptimum, horizontal well was selected marginward along the
side of the channel. Another benefit of this location was the
use of an existing wellbore with 7 casing for re-entry
sidetracking, thus reducing costs.

drainage that is providing the force that moves oil to the

producing well. Therefore, restricting a wells production to
the rate that oil is gravity draining is the only way to avoid
producing excessive free gas.

There were multiple concerns regarding the drilling of these

two horizontal wells: 1) Hole stability during drilling
resulting from the high quality and limited cementation of the
sandstone. 2) Ability to effectively remove drilling mud cake
(requires 5+ psi of drawdown) from the entire lateral after
completion because of the expected very low (less than 1 psig)
production drawdown. 3) Ability to maintain the trajectory of
the well near the base of the sand channel. No hole stability,
significant washout, hole cleaning or mud loss problems were
encountered while drilling the lateral.

Current results from the pilot are meeting the pilot objectives.
A stable gas cap is being maintained in the pilot area by
balancing gas injection with oil, water and gas production on a
reservoir basis. Two horizontal wells have been drilled along
the base of the sand channel and are being successfully
produced without excessive gas coning. Comparison of logs
across the pilot area indicate a flat contact confirming gravity
stable displacement. However, modification of the pilot plans
during implementation complicates direct comparison to the
original simulation production predictions. Changes made
during pilot implementation include the one year delay before
drilling the horizontals, drilling of only two, longer
horizontals and utilization of the higher initial production rates
to improve lateral clean-up. For example, Fig. 6 is an oil rate
vs.- cumulative oil comparison of the original simulation
results scaled to match the 2000 foot lateral length of the first
pilot horizontal. Early oil production rates appear to be much
higher than predicted. However, the early simulations
included production from the horizontals as soon as gas
injection was started. This caused the early oil production
rates to be lower compared with the actual pilot results which
benefited from more than a year of gas injection and related
oil drainage before production. The sharp decrease in rate in
the first horizontal well (Fig. 6) was caused by artificial lift
problems experienced when a progressing cavity pump was
tested and failed. Once this pump was replaced with an ESP,
higher rates were achieved. As shown in Fig. 6, current rates
are more in line with the model predictions.
Subsequent simulation with actual pilot fluid production rates
is currently under way, but history matching has not been
completed. However, as Fig. 7 shows, because of the
previously mentioned operational changes in the pilot, even
preliminary work with the current simulation tracks pilot
performance better than the pre-pilot simulation.

Based on lab tests and the expected very low drawdown,

massive horizontal productivity damage was expected because
of the muds filter cake which takes several psi of drawdown
for cleanup. Upon investigation of less damaging mud
systems, it was determined that a solids free xanthan and
starch system should minimize damage. The use of this mud
system was viewed as a great success when, upon cleanup, the
drawdown was less than 1 psig (quartz gauge) while
producing 3600 bbls of water per day in the water bailing
stage before oil production.
During the drilling of the horizontals, directional control was
hindered by high friction while sliding to make directional
corrections. After drilling 400-500 feet of the lateral, static
friction rose to such a level that attempts to slide to make
directional corrections resulted in applying too much weight
on bit when breaking the friction, thus stalling the downhole
motor. Friction was no problem whatsoever while rotating.
Because the friction hindered optimum placement of the
wellbore at the channel base, a cost effective rotary steerable
will be evaluated for improving future well placement.
After each of the two horizontals were drilled, a pre-drilled
liner was run in the hole and the portion of the liner above the
productive horizontal section was cemented in place to
prevent gas cap access to the annulus. During completion, an
oversized electric submersible pump (ESP) was run in each
well to produce the horizontal at as high a rate as possible to
maximize drawdown and cleanup. The wells were produced
at this high rate until gas break through was experienced at
which time artificial lift was changed to a smaller variable
speed unit. These variable speed artificial lift units were sized
with reservoir simulation results. The artificial lift rate was
optimized by reducing the total fluid production rate each time
excess free (non-solution) gas production occurred. It is
important to understand in optimizing artificial lift that the gas
cannot push the oil to the producing well because of the
extremely unfavorable gas-oil mobility ratio. The pilot well
performance demonstrated that producing free gas lowers
artificial lift efficiency and increases recycle compression
costs with no improvement in oil production. It is gravity

Pilot Results

Time lapse, carbon-oxygen log results from a monitor well

near the producers are shown in Fig. 8. The logs indicate
progressive downward movement and drainage of the oil in
the timeframe that was predicted. Additional, quantitative
analysis of the logs is under way and is expected to show that
the oil saturation above the gas-oil contact is already less than
the residual from water drive. The lower portion of Fig. 8
displays the vertical oil and gas saturations extracted from the
current simulation model for the same location and times as
the monitor logs shown in the upper portion of the figure.
Although the logs displayed in Fig. 8 are not normalized to a
saturation scale for direct comparison to the simulation data,
the simulation saturation profiles display general agreement
with the gravity drainage contact movements.
The initial projection for pilot duration was 3-5 years and the
pilot has currently been operational for almost four years. On

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SPE 93631

the basis of pilot performance and the value of the information

being obtained, gas injection will likely be continued for
another year. After gas injection is terminated, production
decline from the horizontal wells should increase, but gravity
drainage of the oil in the existing gas cap will continue and
progressively lower oil saturations should be observed with
cased hole logs.
Larger Scale Implementation
Because of the encouraging pilot results, efforts are under way
to expand this process into other areas. A critical path item in
this expansion is the geocellular modeling of the Paluxy
reservoir sand. Because of complex stratigraphic architecture,
geocellular modeling is required for accurate well planning
and flow simulation. Building on the pilot geocellular model,
newer generation geocellular modeling will be used for larger
areas. Each object-based model will be conditioned by
environments of deposition which are composed of variable
amounts of core-calibrated petrofacies.
The various
petrofacies, determined from shale volume (Vsh) log
calculations and tied to conventional core descriptions,
include sandstone, shaly sandstone, sandy shale and
mudstone. Porosity-permeability algorithms were generated
from borehole-corrected, core-calibrated density porosity
curves and were used in concert with the Vsh curves from
wells without density logs to populate the model.
A key component of modeling and well planning is the
mapping of current day water saturation into the models.
Approximately 300 existing wells have modern dual induction
logs that allow accurate calculation of water saturation at the
time the well was logged. The water saturations will be
adjusted to current day conditions by material balance using
volumes produced after logging.
The water saturations at
current conditions will then be mapped to determine the best
way to populate the geocellular model.
Once the geocellular model is complete, locations and lateral
paths for the horizontal wells will be chosen. The 3-D
geocellular models facilitate accurate visualization and
positioning of the well paths. Lessons learned from drilling
and completing the pilot horizontals will be leveraged to
optimize placement and design. Wells will be placed as close
to the base of sand channels as possible. When possible,
multiple, alternative placements of the horizontal laterals will
be selected and subsequently evaluated with flow simulation
to select the placement that performs best. The wells will be
drilled with a non-damaging mud system and will use a predrilled liner in open hole design. All the liner above the sand
base will be un-drilled pipe and will be cemented to prevent
gas flow down the annulus. Initial artificial lift will be
capable of at least 4000 barrels of fluid per day to promote
cleanup and flow contribution from the entire lateral. After
initial cleanup, variable speed artificial lift will be used to
reduce production rates with time as necessary to control free
gas production.
Methods to measure gas and liquid
production and automatically control artificial lift speed are
being investigated.

A reservoir simulator, which has been history matched to the

pilot performance will use the well locations developed from
the well planning effort and will predict production, injection
and gas recycle flowstreams. This effort will also help
determine correct well spacing. As in the pilot, a monitor
logging program utilizing many of the inactive vertical
wellbores will be designed to track contacts and their
movement with time. An air separation unit will be used to
cryogenically extract nitrogen from air to provide the low cost
nitrogen injectant.
Conclusions
Designing and implementing a small scale, low cost pilot of
this EOR process provided substantial benefits including:

Reduction in EOR performance uncertainty

Calibration of larger scale simulation effort
Identification and evaluation of major risks
Identification of potential optimizations
Improved scale up of costs and equipment

Gas injection resulting in gravity dominated film drainage has

the potential to significantly increase oil recovery. However,
the specific application should be carefully investigated to
ensure impacts of reservoir geometry, oil saturation, rock and
fluid properties, horizontal well application and minimum
economic production rates are properly modeled and
understood. For large applications, a small pilot to obtain
actual data from the process is very beneficial.
Acknowledgements
We gratefully acknowledge the support and encouragement of
ExxonMobil Production Company management both in the
U.S. Production and Central Technology organizations and
appreciate their permission to publish this paper. The
analysis, planning and implementation efforts described in this
paper were provided in large part by: Rodney Bane, John
Barber, Greg Benson, Ronnie Brown, Jim Bulau, Omar Cano,
Bill Duncan, Floyce Eason, Kim Ferrall, Dale Fitz, Charles
Freeman, Pete Gibson, Danny Hailey, Natalie Hall, Dodie
Hecker, Kent Hesterley, Cynthia James, Raymond Jones, Orea
Rodgers, Dave Kinison, Gary Kompanik, Jerry Ladd, John
Lane, David Loggins, Bob Mathew, Jesse Mays, Jerry
McNabb, Cheryl Miller, Mike Moffitt, Rubert Moseley, Brett
Pennington, David Perry, Victor Rahmanian, Shon Robinson,
Tracey Schmitt, Ram Seetharam, Stephanie Sexton, Rob
Shultz, Scott Stedman, Hermann Stewart, Gary Sykes, Bill
Teel, Rick Torres, Pat Underwood, Gann-Shyong Wang,
Steve Watson, Kerry White, Bob Whitson, and James
Williams. We sincerely appreciate the efforts of those listed
(plus others whom we may have regretfully missed) without
which this successful EOR pilot would not have been
possible.

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SPE 93631

Units and Conversions

Barrel (bbl) = 0.159 Cubic Meters
Pound Per Square Inch Gauge (psig) = 6.8948 Kilopascals
Gauge
Standard Cubic Feet (scf) = 0.02832 Cubic Meters (at
standard surface conditions)
Centipoise (cp) = 0.001 Pascal Second (Pa.s)
References
1.

2.

3.

4.

Edwards, J.T., Honarpour, M.M., Hazlett, R.D., Cohen,

M., Membere, A., Pebdani, F., Clayton, C., Al-Hussainy,
R.: Validation of Gravity-dominated Relative
Permeability and Residual Oil Saturation in a Giant Oil
Reservoir SPE 49316 (1998)
Richardson, J.G, Blackwell, R.J: Use of Simple
Mathematical Models for Predicting Reservoir Behavior
SPE 2928 (1970)
Carlson, L.O: Performance of Hawkins Field Under Gas
Drive-Pressure Maintenance Operation and Development
of an Enhanced Oil Recovery Project SPE/DOE 17324
(1988)
Langenberg, M.A., Henry, D.M., Chlebana, M.R.:
Performance and Expansion Plans for the Double
Displacement Process in the Hawkins Field Unit SPE
28603 (1994)

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SPE 93631

Figure 1 - Typical Sand Channel X-Section After Primary Recovery

Oil Trapped in Low Quality Portion of Sand Channel
(Typical Channel X-Section With Water Drive)

Aquifer Water Sweeps

Highest Quality Bottom
Portion of Channel

Trapped Oil

Figure 2 - Sand Channel X-Section After Gas Injection

Gas Injection Moves Oil To Highest Quality Sand
(Typical Channel X-Section After Gas Injection)

Gas Injected at
Top Of Sand
Oil Drains Into Highest
Quality Bottom Portion of
Channel

Horizontal Well

Figure 3 - Pilot Area Flow Simulation Model (Top View)

100 Foot
Square
Cells
Constant Pressure (Aquifer) Injection at Base of Channel

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SPE 93631

Figure 4 - Pilot Area Simulation Model After Gas Injection

Gas Injector (Red)

Short Horizontal Laterals

Figure 5 - Pilot Area Map with Injector, Monitor Wells and Horizontals

Pilot Area Map

D

F au l t

Gas Injector

#2
ontal
Horiz

#1
ontal
z
i
r
o
H

Darker colors indicate Thicker Sand

C-O Monitor
500'

Neutron Monitor

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SPE 93631

Figure 6 - Actual vs.- Original Prediction of Horizontal Production

EOR Pilot - Horz Well #1 -vs.- Pre-Pilot Simulation Model
O il Rate
Barrels Per Day

400
350

Lower Rates Due to Artificial Lift Failures

300
250
200
150
100
50
0
0

Actual
Model

50

100

150

200

250

300

350

Cumulative Oil Production (Thousands of Barrels)

Figure 7 - Actual vs.- Preliminary Current Simulation

EOR Pilot - Horz Well #1 -vs.- Current Preliminary Simulation Model
450

O il Rate
Barrels Per D ay

400
350
300
250
200
150
100
50
0

Actual
Model

20

40

60

Cumulative Oil Production (Thousands of Barrels)

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80

10

SPE 93631

Figure 8 - Time Lapse Contacts from Cased Hole Carbon-Oxygen Logs

Compared to Reservoir Simulation Saturations
Actual Results from Monitor #1
Saturations From Time Lapse C/O Logs
Nov. 2001
Oil
Gas

Feb. 2002
Oil
Gas

Oct. 2002
Gas
Oil

Feb. 2003
Oil
Gas

Dec. 2003
Oil
Gas

D ep th

Feb. 2001
Gas
Oil

Current Preliminary Simulation Results

Time Lapse Saturations at Monitor #1 Location In Model
Gas

Oil

Gas

Oil

Gas

Oil

Gas

D ep th

Oil

(Saturations Increase To Right)

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Oil

Gas

Oil

Gas