The Performance of Water Floods with Horizontal and Multilateral Wells

The use of horizontal and multilateral wells in the oil industry has increased rapidly during the last two decades. The main reason for this upsurge is that horizontal and multilateral wells provide a large contact area with the reservoir, and therefore enhance the well productivity or injectivity better than conventional vertical wells. The high productivity coupled with the recent advances in drilling technology for horizontal and multilateral wells has made their application an economically viable option. In this study, the performance of nonconventional wells in water flooding projects was investigated using numerical simulation techniques. Extensive three-dimensional, fine-mesh simulation runs are performed to determine the oil recovery by nonconventional wells under different operating/reservoir conditions. Results show that the pattern used has a significant effect on the displacement performance of nonconventional wells. The study shows the various conditions under which nonconventional wells will perform better than the use of conventional vertical wells.