Case Study: PetroChina Company Ltd. boosts waterflood recovery with SLB's automated pattern flood management

CNPC Xinjiang Enhances Waterflood Recovery with Automated Pattern Flood Management

SLB worked with PetroChina Company Ltd.’s Xinjiang Oilfield to improve recovery from the Huoshaoshan oil field in the Junggar Basin, where a mature waterflood had become highly irregular across a large, faulted, multilayer reservoir with complex remaining-oil distribution. The field’s traditional manual injection-allocation process was slow, taking more than a month to update all injectors, and earlier attempts to reduce water cut without hurting oil output had been inconsistent or too costly.

SLB implemented an automated workflow using the Petrel E&P software platform and ECLIPSE FrontSim streamline simulation with pattern flood management to optimize water injection allocations for individual wells. The solution increased oil production in more than 60% of the producer pilot wells, reduced water cut, lowered injection in over 50% of injectors, cut water handling costs, and reduced the time needed to determine optimal injection factors from more than a month to less than a week.

PetroChina Company Ltd.