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Project Completion Report OWRT Project No. A-075-ARIZ / Agreement No. 14-34-0001-7006 / Project Dates: July 1976 - June 1977 / "The work upon which this report is based was supported by funds provided by the United States Department of the Interior, Office of Water Research and Technology as authorized under the Water Resources Research Act of 1964, the State of Arizona, and the Arizona Department of Transportation and Federal Highway Administration

A field development plan is an important document used to tell the share holders and investors that every aspect of the project has been carefully evaluated. The field development plan should include the objectives of the development, petroleum engineering data, operating and maintenance principles, description of engineering facilities, cost and manpower estimates, project planning and budget proposal. But to arrive at decisions concerning the contents of the field development plan many concept and ideas would have to be screened so that the best ideas and concepts are carried forward for detailed analysis. This screening process can be daunting as there is no limit to the number of viable concepts and ideas. To add to this, for a new field there is hardly ever enough data to fully characterize the reservoir at the time the field development plan is being formulated because there are only a handful of wells in the reservoir. This lack of information about the reservoir introduces uncertainty in the analysis done during the screening process of the concept selection and can have a significant impact on the quality of the project. In this work, we present a simple integrated asset model that can be used in conjunction with a proposed framework at the concept screening and selection phase of a project to evaluate the impact of uncertainty in the input variables on key project drivers. The model can be used to screen multiple concepts to arrive at a few promising concepts that point the direction for detailed studies. The application of the model is demonstrated with synthetic cases formulated for a deep water field which is at the concept selection phase. In the demonstration, we investigated how uncertainty in the reservoir thickness (NTG) and the degree of heterogeneity affect the optimal choices for initial facility size, the number of rigs and the number of pre drilled wells. / text

Chemical flooding has been studied for 50 years. However, never have the conditions encouraging its growth been as good as right now. Those conditions being new, improved technology and oil prices high enough to make implementation economical. The objective of this work was to develop economical, robust chemical formulations and processes that recover oil in field pilots when properly implemented. This experimental study goes through the process of testing surfactants to achieve optimal phase behavior, coreflooding with the best chemical formulations, improving the formulation and testing it in more corefloods, and then finally recommending the formulation to be tested in a field pilot. The target reservoir contains a light (34° API, 10 cP), non-reactive oil at about 22° C. The formation is a moderate permeability (50 - 300 mD) sandstone with a high clay content (up to 13%). Different surfactants and surfactant mixtures were tested with the oil including alkyl benzene sulfonates (ABS), Guerbet alcohol sulfates (GAS), alkyl propoxy sulfates, and internal olefin sulfonates (IOS). The best formulation contained 0.75% TDA -13PO-SO₄, 0.25% C₂₀₋₂₄ IOS, 0.75% isobutanol (IBA), 1% Na₂CO₃, all which are mixed in a softened fresh water from a supply well. Corefloods recovered 93% of residual oil from reservoir cores. Core flood experiments were also done with the alkali sodium carbonate to measure the effluent pH in a Bentheimer sandstone core with a cation exchange capacity (CEC) of 2 meq/100g. Floods at frontal velocities of 100, 10, and 0.33 ft/D were performed with 0.3 pore volume slugs of 0.7% Na₂CO₃ at 86° C. The effluent was analyzed for ions and pH breakthrough. It was found that the pH breakthrough occurred before surfactant breakthrough would be expected as desired although the pH was lower at a frontal velocity of 0.33 ft/D than at the higher velocities. The Na₂CO₃ consumption was 0.244, 0.238, and 0.207 meq/100 g rock at velocities of 100, 10, and 0.33 ft/D, respectively. In addition, a no-alkaline formulation consisting of a new large hydrophobe ether carboxylate surfactant mixed with an internal olefin sulfonate was tested on an active oil and it successfully recovered 99% of the waterflood remaining oil from an Ottawa sand pack with no salinity gradient and no alkali. The final residual oil saturation after the chemical flood (S[subscript orc]) was only 0.005 / text

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Water Brief, Fourth Draft / 6.16.76 / Introduction: The need for an efficient method of storage of water in arid zones has long been recognized. Efforts have been made everywhere to develop small storage tanks to provide water at critical periods. However, most of the existing tanks have such annual or seasonal evaporation losses that they are equal or even greater than the average depth of the tank. Thus many of these tanks are completely depleted before the end of the dry season, often with dramatic consequences for human beings, livestock or agricultural activities depending on the water supply. Reducing the heavy evaporation and seepage losses in these tanks is an important way to increase the supply of water. Several methods have been developed to reduce these losses but one of the most effective ways is to make the tanks with a smaller surface but deeper. The importance of making tanks deeper has been recognized for many years but there are several constraints for achieving depth in tanks: (a) the gradient of the water stream, (b) the unsuitability of dozers to work in deep pits, and (c) shallow soils. However, these constraints can be removed by using high rise banks and water pumps. Efficiency can also be improved by keeping the water concentrated. With this idea in mind, Mr. Cluff, FAO Consultant, has developed the concept of the compartmented tank, which is being tried out successfully in Mexico, and whose main features are summarized below.

Project Completion Report, OWRT Project No. A-082-ARIZ / Agreement No. 14-34-0001-8003, Project Dates: October 1977-September 1978 / Acknowledgement: The work upon which this report is based was supported by funds provided by the United States Department of the Interior, Office of Water Research and Technology, as authorized under the Water Resources Research Act of 1978. / This report contains the results of a one year study to apply the compartmented reservoir concept to water storage problems in Arizona. The range of selected projects was from a ten thousand cubic meter (8.1 af) reservoir for a water harvesting agrisystem at Black Mesa, to a 238 million cubic meter (200,000 af) flood control dam, Tat Momolikot Dam on the Papago Reservation, to supply water for irrigation. Other sites studied were the Santa Cruz River at Continental, to supply an industrial /domestic water, Leslie Creek site for recreation, and improvement of Mormon Lake for recreation. Evaporation from Tat Momolikot and Mormon Lake are presently consuming most of the available water. Through compartmentalization this evaporation can be significantly reduced. At the other potential dam sites on the Santa Cruz and Leslie Creek the use of a compartmented reservoir will make these otherwise marginal projects practical. The Black Mesa Agrisystem is presently demonstrating the utility of the compartmented reservoir system.

Tight gas reservoirs provide almost one quarter of the current U.S. domestic gas production, with significant projected increases in the next several decades in both the U.S. and abroad. These reservoirs constitute an important play type, with opportunities for improved reservoir simulation & management, such as simulation model design, well placement. Our work develops robust and efficient strategies for improved tight gas reservoir simulation and management. Reservoir simulation models are usually acquired by upscaling the detailed 3D geologic models. Earlier studies of flow simulation have developed layer-based coarse reservoir simulation models, from the more detailed 3D geologic models. However, the layer-based approach cannot capture the essential sand and flow. We introduce and utilize the diffusive time of flight to understand the pressure continuity within the fluvial sands, and develop novel adaptive reservoir simulation grids to preserve the continuity of the reservoir sands. Combined with the high resolution transmissibility based upscaling of flow properties, and well index based upscaling of the well connections, we can build accurate simulation models with at least one order magnitude simulation speed up, but the predicted recoveries are almost indistinguishable from those of the geologic models. General practice of well placement usually requires reservoir simulation to predict the dynamic reservoir response. Numerous well placement scenarios require many reservoir simulation runs, which may have significant CPU demands. We propose a novel simulation-free screening approach to generate a quality map, based on a combination of static and dynamic reservoir properties. The geologic uncertainty is taken into consideration through an uncertainty map form the spatial connectivity analysis and variograms. Combining the quality map and uncertainty map, good infill well locations and drilling sequence can be determined for improved reservoir management. We apply this workflow to design the infill well drilling sequence and explore the impact of subsurface also, for a large-scale tight gas reservoir. Also, we evaluated an improved pressure approximation method, through the comparison with the leading order high frequency term of the asymptotic solution. The proposed pressure solution can better predict the heterogeneous reservoir depletion behavior, thus provide good opportunities for tight gas reservoir management.