Optimization of Injection Well Placement in Faulted Reservoir for Water Flooding Process

Waterflooding is one of the most economical and preferable method to increase oil recovery in a depleted reservoir. Waterflooding is the process of injecting compatible water under certain pressure into the reservoir in order to enhance or maintain the reservoir driving energy. This process was discovered by accident almost 100 years ago when water from a shallow water-bearing horizon break into a packer and then entered an oil column in a well thus resulting in declining of oil production of the respective well. However, it was noticed that the production of the offset wells that are producing from the same reservoir was increasing. Since then, the use of waterflooding has slowly grown until it becomes one of the most significant fluid injection recovery technique.
In order to improve the ultimate oil recovery during waterflooding, it is essential to find the optimum injection well placement. Thus, this project is focusing on the optimum placement of water injection well by using Genetic Algorithms (GA) as the optimization tool. A simple GA is proposed to be develop and used in determining the optimum well injector placement in a synthetic reservoir with cumulative oil production maximization as the objective function.
Injection well placement optimization is one of the most challenging and worrisome problems and it often arises due to lack of resources and appropriate tools, thus making it done on trial and error bases [1]. Drilling a water injection well at the wrong location may lead to more complicated problems such as further decreasing in oil production and early breakthrough of water in the production wells.