Application of cumulative-in-situ-injection-production technology to supplement hydrocarbon recovery among fractured tight oil reservoirs: A case study in Changqing Oilfield, China

Abstract Water flooding and gas injection are two traditional secondary development methods for tight oil reservoirs. Water injection has the problem of small injectivity due to low permeable reservoir matrix while gas injection brings about severe breakthrough because of obvious viscosity difference between gas and oil. These traditional approaches that supplement energy between wells are not highly effective. To fill this gap, this paper proposes an efficient energy-supplement method, continuous in-situ injection and production (CIIP), among fractures for multistage fractured horizontal well (MFHW) in tight oil reservoirs. CIIP divides hydraulic fractures into two kinds, in which odd fractures are used for production while even fractures are for injection. CIIP has three main advantages over traditional water flooding: firstly, it switches displacement interval from between injection and production wells to between hydraulic fractures; secondly, CIIP has a better injectivity compared to traditional water flooding at the same injection pressure; and thirdly, CIIP improves sweep efficiency thereby improving oil recovery. In this paper, a workflow is developed to evaluate the performance of CIIP in a case study. Reservoir properties and micro-seismic (MS) mapping data are analyzed to provide fundamental parameters for building a numerical simulation model, and then history matching is achieved to validate the model. The simulation considers two scenarios of hydraulic fractures: the uniform and non-uniform fractures. Uniform-fracture simulation aims to investigate the mechanisms of CIIP under three fracture models; different fracture half-lengths and the situation of existing high permeable channels between injection and production fractures are also included in uniform-fracture simulation. Non-uniform-fracture simulation, whose fractures are interpreted according to MS mapping results, is devised to demonstrate CIIP’s superiority in a realistic way. This study is based on a theoretical approach and the results wait to be further proven in the field. Simulation results demonstrate that CIIP is an efficient energy-supplement method. It helps to maintain reservoir pressure near the initial condition during the thirty-year simulation. Meanwhile, even if ten injection wells are added, CIIP still injects 55% more water than water injection (WI) at the same injection pressure. Uniform-fracture simulation indicates that CIIP has a 2.23% more oil recovery than WI and a 3.74% than depletion. Besides, the influence of high permeable channels between injection and production fractures is insignificant and we can still expect CIIP’s good performance when hydraulic fractures hit local natural fractures. The non-uniform-fracture simulation demonstrates that CIIP performs well too when hydraulic fractures are randomly distributed. It also finds outs that the presence of primary fractures in which proppant concentrates is essential to CIIP while the role of natural fractures is trivial compared to the hydraulic fractures. In a word, CIIP is a promising technology for tight oil reservoir development.