Steel-cased wells in 3-D controlled source EM modelling

Over the last decades, electromagnetic methods have become an accepted tool for a wide range of geophysical exploration purposes and nowadays even for monitoring. Application to hydrocarbon monitoring, for example for enhanced oil recovery, is hampered by steelcased wells, which typically exist in large numbers in producing oil fields and which distort electromagnetic fields in the subsurface. Steel casings have complex geometries as they are very thin but vertically extended; moreover, the conductivity contrast of steel to natural materials is in the range of six orders of magnitude. It is therefore computationally prohibitively costly to include such structures directly into the modelling grid, even for finite element methods. To tackle the problem we developed a method to describe steel-cased wells as series of substitute dipole sources, which effectively interact with the primary field. The new approach cannot only handle a single steel-cased well, but also an arbitrary number, and their interaction with each other. We illustrate the metal casing effect with synthetic 3-D modelling of land-based controlled source electromagnetic data. Steel casings distort electromagnetic fields even for large borehole-transmitter distances above 2 km. The effect depends not only on the distance between casing and transmitter, but also on the orientation of the transmitter to the borehole. Finally, we demonstrate how the presence of steel-cased wells can be exploited to increase the sensitivity and enhance resolution in the target region. Our results show that it is at least advisable to consider the distribution of steel-cased wells already at the planning phase of a controlled source electromagnetic field campaign.