Formation-damage evaluation from nonlinear skin growth during coreflooding

Abstract

Injectivity decline of oilfield injection wells is a widespread phenomenon during seawater/produced-water injection. The decline may result in significant cost increase of the waterflooding project. Reliable modeling-based prediction of injectivity-index decrease is important for waterflood design as well as for the planning of preventive injected-water treatment. One of the reasons for well injectivity decline is permeability decrease caused by rock plugging by solid/liquid particles suspended in the injected water. The mathematical model for deep-bed filtration contains two empirical functions: the filtration coefficient and the formation-damage coefficient. These empirical coefficients must be determined from laboratory coreflood tests by forcing water with particles to flow through the core samples. A routine laboratory method determines the filtration coefficient from expensive and difficult particle-concentration measurements at the core effluent; then, the formation-damage coefficient is determined from inexpensive and simple pressure-drop measurements. An alternative three-point-pressure method uses pressure data at an intermediate point of the core, supplementing pressure measurements at the core inlet and outlet. The method provides unique and stable values for constant-filtration and formation-damage coefficients. In the current work, we consider a more complex case in which both coefficients are linear functions of retained-particle concentration. In this case, the model is fully determined by four constants. The three-point-pressure method furnishes unique values for the four model parameters. A new semianalytical model for axisymmetric suspension filtration was developed to predict well-injectivity decline from the linear coreflood data with pressure measurements in three core points.