Abstract
The Furrial reservoir exploitation unit is located in the eastern part of Venezuela and from 1993 it has shown calcium carbonate scale problems due to the injection of water for the secondary recovery of oil. The producing wells in this field have shown recurring failures because of calcium carbonate deposition; in fact, there have been production delays because of this phenomenon. In order to avoid future holdups and problems in the production of oil at the Furrial field, it is necessary to apply treatments that will control scale deposition. Nevertheless, these treatments should be directed at the wells with a greater scaling tendency at the time of application and then to those wells with lesser risk of deposition.
A critical analysis was performed on the 63 producing wells that make up the Furrial UEY in order to arrange the wells in a hierarchy according to their scaling character. This hierarchy was constructed based on the calculations of different factors that affect the deposition of calcium carbonate: water composition and volume, pressure decrease and failure frequency. From this ranking a matrix was developed that places wells in a hierarchy in order of non-critical, semi-critical, and critical according to their scaling tendency and the occurrence of failures due to deposition of calcium carbonate.
