Abstract
This paper investigates advanced inflow control for managing water production in mature fields, using two field-scale simulation case studies from the Norne and Volve oilfields on the Norwegian Continental Shelf. In both cases, density-activated recovery (DAR) autonomous inflow control devices were implemented in multi-segmented wells and tested under a range of water-cut (WCT) thresholds and nozzle configurations, with base cases representing conventional completions without inflow control. In the modified Norne model, moderate shutoff settings achieve 20–37% reductions in produced water and corresponding reductions in water injection, while limiting cumulative oil losses to 3–9%. More aggressive shutoff yields larger water savings but becomes increasingly penalizing for oil production and is unlikely to be optimal from an economic perspective. In the more heterogeneous and faulted Volve model, incorporating realistic valve hysteresis and moderate choking improves cumulative oil production relative to the base case, while reducing produced water by up to 85% and lowering the need for injection and water treatment. Together, the two case studies demonstrate that properly tuned autonomous inflow control can significantly reduce water handling and associated energy use, while maintaining or even enhancing oil recovery, provided that WCT limits and valve configurations are optimized to field-specific conditions.