Hot water flooding and cold water flooding in heavy oil reservoirs

ABSTRACT

Murphy Oil’s Seal asset in the Peace River Oil Sands region in North West Alberta, Canada, has a remarkable capacity for implementation of Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) processes. Some wells in Seal have shown strong historical production due to excellent permeability and the foamy solution gas drive mechanism. The reservoir characteristics in this portion are highly variable where determining the most suitable EOR method is very challenging. Two of the potential EOR candidates which have been evaluated for this portion include conventional cold waterflooding and hot waterflooding. Results of EOR core analysis, logging, detailed seismic and petrophysical studies, and history-matched reservoir simulation and forecast indicate that cold waterflooding outperforms hot waterflooding. This is surprising as hot waterflooding is believed to outperform cold waterflooding in most medium heavy oil reservoirs.

KEYWORDS:

• Cold waterflood
• heavy oil
• hot waterflood
• seal lake
• sweep efficiency

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Murphy Oil Company Ltd. for permission to publish this work.