Injection of produced water for pressure support or disposal has always been challenging, in view of water quality and its potential negative effects. Achieving optimum and sustained injectivity throughout life-of well in a cost-effective manner are key objectives. This session addresses various efforts that have been implemented (successfully or not) in an attempt to achieve this desired objective. Discussions will center on fields results that may include process changes, new procedures, pilot tests, analyses, simulation and/or modelling. Furthermore, PWRI wells’ Injectivity restoration procedures and processes through stimulation will be addressed in this session.

Session Chairpersons: Per Einar Svela, Equinor; Max Baumert, ExxonMobil

Whatever the model used to understand, model, and predict the injectivity of water injectors, its validation is always difficult because it is confronted with the lack of real field data such as pressures, temperatures, water quality, flow rate, flow conformance, for example. This is often true for deep water wells because each intervention to carry out a PLT or a simple thermometry to determine the flow conformance, could be long and expensive. One way to validate these models is to carry out laboratory tests under controlled conditions and different scales (centimetric to metric under stress or not) and under various injection regimes (matrix and/or frac). This is particularly interesting when dealing with unconsolidated reservoirs, which in addition to the validation of the models, original tests carried out in the laboratory should allow understanding of their behavior particularly in terms of frac and improving the physics implemented in the models which is still unknown. This session is dedicated to present and discuss this type of lab work and modelling approaches.

Session Chairperson: Claudio Furtado, Petrobras

This session focuses on the best practices for optimizing injector well performance. Topics related to optimum drilling and completion program, ability to inject above fracture pressure, injection system availability with high water quality together with surveillance and analysis-driven ramp-ups to target injection rates are covered.

Ensuring injection operations for pressure maintenance or waste disposal remain within the target injection domain has important implications: economically by providing better sweep efficiency leading to less injectors, operationally through the ability to inject safely, and reducing environmental impact providing support on license to operate. Injection geomechanics provides insights into injector performance and injectivity, which depends on effective stress affecting rock deformations and fluid flows around the wellbore region and in the reservoir. This helps us improve completion design, predict fracture extension over time, prevent injector failures, and deliver safer operating guidelines for fluid containment. Methods to ensure containment, surveillance to track and verify containment as well as cases where containment is/was challenging, will be presented.

Session Chairpersons: Duane Mikulencak, Shell; Amr El-Fayoumi, Chevron

Water injection and its effectiveness has a substantial impact on project economics. This session will discuss recently developed and emerging technologies applied to enhance water injection efficiency.

Session Chairpersons: Indra Gunawan, ConocoPhillips; Balkrishna (Bala) Gadiyar, SLB