A strategy for attacking excess water production

This paper describes a straightforward strategy for diagnosing and solving excess-water-production problems. The strategy advocates that the easiest problems should be attacked first and that diagnosis of water production problems should begin with the information already at hand. A listing of water-production problems is provided, along with a ranking of their relative ease of solution. Although a broad range of water-shutoff technologies is considered, the major focus of the paper is when and where gels can be effectively applied for water shutoff.