Advanced well architectures are widely considered for accelerating production. This work continues previous work on accelerating recovery via waterflood in application of what has been called pi-mode production, in which the objective is to produce up to 50% of the oil in place
in the drainage volume in less than 5 years. Previous studies considered only a homogeneous drainage volume. In this study, to evaluate the effect of heterogeneity in 2-D areally, many permeability fields corresponding to different standard deviation (or Dykstra-Parsons coefficient), horizontal maximum and minimum correlation lengths (or connectivity) were generated using geostatistical simulation techniques.

Stochastic representation of reservoir model offers the chance to observe reservoir performance under many equiprobable geological images or realizations. The effect of reservoir heterogeneity on the water breakthrough recovery, pressure drop between the injection and production wells at 90% watercut and ultimate recovery has been investigated. The heterogeneity parameters may be estimated in a given situation from actual seismic and log data as well as from expected value ranges associated with a particular analog geology. As such, this analysis can be used to plan well lengths and spacings in new developments based on data gathered from the appraisal process.