Effect of scaling parameters on waterflood performance with horizontal and vertical wells

This paper presents numerical study on the effect of scaling parameters on the waterflood performance with different well configurations. The oil recoveries obtained from experiments on a laboratory scale model have been compared with those obtained from a model, which is scaled up using scaling relationships which are in the form of dimensionless numbers. The effects of dimensionless scaling groups like effective aspect ratio, mobility ratio, buoyancy number, and capillary number on breakthrough oil recovery (BOR) with four different well configurations, viz., vertical injection-vertical production (VI-VP), vertical injection-horizontal production at top (VI-HPT), vertical injection-horizontal production at bottom (VI-HPB), and horizontal injection at bottom-horizontal production at top (HIB-HPT), are reported. It is found that the HIB-HPT well configuration gives higher oil recovery and that VI-HPB gives lower recovery than other well configurations under most of the conditions considered. For higher buoyancy numbers, all configurations result in lower BOR values except VI-HPT, which leads to a higher BOR. However, the performance of other well configurations is also comparable to that of HIB-HPT under certain conditions.