화학공학소재연구정보센터
Journal of Canadian Petroleum Technology, Vol.50, No.2, 11-16, 2011
Estimation of Reservoir Hydraulic Property From Surface Heave Monitoring During Subsurface Fluid Injection
Subsurface fluid injections, such as wastewater disposal, water-flooding, and CO(2) sequestration, cause reservoir dilation. The reservoir dilation induces displacements in the overburden extending up to the ground surface and resulting in surface heave. Previous studies have illustrated that it is possible to delineate the extent of the reservoir dilation from the surface heave measurement using an inverse technique. This paper proposes that the inverse technique can be extended to estimate the growth and propagation of the reservoir dilation during the fluid injection if the surface heave is monitored continually. Then, the reservoir pressure distribution and hydraulic properties could also possibly be determined from the fluid-flow equations. The results obtained from the proposed technique were compared with those obtained from a fully-coupled finite element (FE) simulation of a fluid injection problem. It was found that the numerical tool could be successfully adopted to estimate an approximate value of the reservoir permeability.