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THE BACK COVER | Contents

Improving Strategies for Recovering Oil

The movement of water through an oil reservoir is critical to determining the economics of the field. The blue contour shows the advance of water from two injection wells, one in each lobe of a tilted oxbow reservoir, so called for the type of meandering river channel that created the original reservoir sand. The orthogonal slices in the planes of the injection wells are colored according to the local rate of change of water saturation, highlighting the width of the water-oil displacement front. The limits of the reservoir are indicated by the red "curtain." The timing of water arrival at these wells is an important issue in planning oil recovery strategies. This detailed simulation was run with the IPARS software at the Center for Subsurface Modeling and visualized with tools provided by the Center for Computational Visualization at the Texas Institute for Computational and Applied Mathematics.