Field Cases - Water Shutoff & Conformance
Water Shutoff Field Cases. Real-world applications provide invaluable insights into the effectiveness, challenges, and optimization of water shut-off and conformance control technologies. This section presents a selection of field case studies documenting the use of polymer and gel treatments to control excess water production in a variety of reservoir settings—from fractured horizontal wells to naturally fractured carbonates.
Key examples include gel water shut-off in fractured or faulted horizontal wells, where simple diagnostic calculations helped estimate fracture widths and gel penetration distances. These case histories underline the importance of field monitoring, including pressure data before, during, and after gel injection, to evaluate treatment effectiveness and improve design strategies.
A significant field study from Venezuela’s Motatán field connects laboratory coreflood measurements with production performance in naturally fractured wells. The treatment of Well P-47 with HPAM gel reduced water cut from 97% to 64% and boosted oil output by 36%. These results demonstrate the value of matching gel formulation and placement volume to reservoir conditions and leveraging sensitivity analysis to fine-tune operations.
Also highlighted is a broad industry survey of gel applications, which reviewed dozens of treatments across multiple operators. While results were mixed, the study emphasized the critical need for proper well candidate selection based on the source and type of water production problem, not just high water/oil ratios. Five different channeling scenarios are discussed, each requiring tailored gel design and sizing methods.
Whether you’re planning a treatment or learning from past projects, these field cases provide practical guidance, diagnostic tools, and operational lessons for designing more reliable and cost-effective WSO and conformance treatments.
Explore the selected Water Shutoff Field Cases articles below to understand what works—and what doesn’t—in the field implementation of gel-based water control solutions.
Table of Contents
Advancement in design and implementation of polymer gel water shutoff treatments in horizontal wells that penetrate fractures or faults have come from empirical improvements in the field and synergism between monitored field treatments and independent laboratory research. One case history will be detailed, followed by a summary of several other treatments. Simple calculations can give at least a rudimentary indication of the width of the fracture or fault that causes excess water production. Using laboratory data coupled with field data collected before, during, and after gel injection, the calculations can also give an indication of how far the gel has actually penetrated into the fracture. Our analyses reveal critical measurements that should be made during field applications and where additional laboratory research is needed.
Previously published field results were examined to determine if they reveal usable guidelines for the selection of wells as candidates for gel treatments. Views of seven gel vendors and experts from eight major oil companies were also examined concerning the selection and implementation of gel treatments in injection and production wells.
This study demonstrates that gel treatments have been applied over a remarkably wide range of conditions. Unfortunately, the success rates for these projects have been very sporadic. Our analysis indicates that the producing water/oil ratio was usually the only criterion used to select candidate wells.
To improve the success rate for future gel applications, the source and nature of the water production problem must be adequately identified. Results from interwell tracer studies and simple injectivity and productivity calculations can be especially useful in this diagnosis. Recovery calculations should indicate that considerable mobile oil remains that could be recovered more cost-effectively if a blocking agent could be realistically placed in the proper location.
Improvements are needed in the methods used for sizing gel treatments. The method of sizing should be tailored to the type of channeling problem encountered. Five different types of channeling problems are discussed.
This paper demonstrates the connection between laboratory measurements and field results from gelant treatments in production wells at the naturally fractured Motatan field in Venezuela. Using a HPAM polymer with an organic crosslinker, laboratory corefloods revealed that under reservoir conditions, the gel provided oil and water residual resistance factors of 20 and 200, respectively. This gel was placed in several production wells in the Motatan field. In Well P-47, 1,000 bbl of this gel reduced the water cut from 97% to 64% and increased the oil production rate by 36%. The success of these treatments depends on the distance of gelant leakoff from the fracture face and the in situ residual resistance factors in the oil and water zones. Analyses were performed to determine these parameters, based on formation permeabilities, porosities, fluid saturations, fluid properties, fluid production rates, and pressure drops before, during, and after gelant placement. Accurate pressure drops before, during, and after gelant placement were particularly important. Sensitivity studies were performed to demonstrate their significance and the impact of measurement errors. A methodology is presented for optimizing the volume of gelant injected for these applications.
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