Turning High-Water-Cut Wells into Geothermal Assets: An Ecopetrol Case Study

In mature oil fields, high-water-cut wells are often viewed as liabilities and candidates for abandonment due to declining hydrocarbon production and rising operating costs.

But in Ecopetrol's Llanos Orientales asset in Colombia, those same wells contained something valuable that had never been fully quantified: Thermal energy.

Using a coupled geothermal simulation workflow in CMG STARS, the team evaluated whether produced water from mature wells could become a viable low-enthalpy geothermal resource.

The study integrated:

• thermal reservoir simulation
• production history
• coupled wellbore heat-loss modelling
• surface thermal energy estimation

Outcome: For Ecopetrol, the results revealed that many high-water-cut wells could deliver:

• >4.5 × 10⁷ BTU/day of usable thermal energy
• equivalent to hundreds of kW of continuous heat
• with minimal modification to existing infrastructure