Waterflooding

The waterflooding process was discovered quite by accident more than 100 years ago when water from a shallow water-bearing horizon leaked around a packer and entered an oil column in a well. The oil production from the well was curtailed, but production from surrounding wells increased. Over the years, the use of waterflooding grew slowly until it became the dominant fluid injection recovery technique. In the following sections, an overview of the process is provided, including information regarding the characteristics of good waterflood candidates and the location of injectors and producers in a waterflood. Ways to estimate the recovery of a waterflood are briefly discussed. The reader is referred to several good references on the subject that provide detailed design criteria.^3–7