Author: Cody D. Keith
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Enhanced oil recovery
Languages : en
Pages : 206
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Book Description
Polymer flooding has become globally established as a potential enhanced oil recovery method for heavy oils. To determine whether this technology may be useful in developing the substantial heavy oil resources on the Alaska North Slope, a polymer flood field pilot commenced at the Milne Point Unit in August 2018. This study seeks to evaluate the results of the field pilot on a technical and economic basis. A reservoir simulation model is constructed and calibrated to predict the oil recovery performance of the pilot through machine-assisted reservoir simulation techniques. To replicate the early water breakthrough observed during waterflooding, transmissibility contrasts are introduced into the simulation model, forcing viscous fingering effects. In the ensuing polymer flood, these transmissibility contrasts are reduced to replicate the restoration of injection conformance during polymer flooding. Transmissibility contrasts are later reinstated to replicate fracture overextension interpreted in one of the producing wells. The calibrated simulation models produced at each stage of the history matching process are used to forecast oil recovery. These forecasts are used as input for economic analysis, incremental to waterflooding expectations. The simulation forecasts indicate that polymer flooding significantly increases the heavy oil production for this field pilot compared to waterflooding alone, yielding attractive project economics. However, meaningful variations between simulation scenarios demonstrate that a simulation model is only valid for prediction if flow behavior in the reservoir remains consistent with that observed during the history matched period. Critically, this means that a simulation model calibrated for waterflooding may not fully capture the technical and economic benefits of an enhanced oil recovery process such as polymer flooding. Subsequently, the simulation model and economic model are used in conjunction to conduct a sensitivity analysis for polymer flood design parameters, from which recommendations are provided for both the continued operation of the current field pilot and future polymer flood designs. The results demonstrate that a higher polymer concentration can be injected due to the development of fractures in the reservoir. The throughput rate should remain high without exceeding operating constraints. A calculated point-forward polymer utilization parameter demonstrates the decreasing efficiency of the polymer flood at later times in the pattern life. Future projects will benefit from starting polymer injection earlier in the pattern life. A pattern with tighter horizontal well spacing will observe a greater incremental benefit from polymer flooding.
Author: Anshul Dhaliwal
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Enhanced oil recovery
Languages : en
Pages : 154
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Book Description
Mineral fouling in heat exchangers has been extensively investigated by researchers in recent times. The oil and gas industry has a long history of fouling issues in production systems as a result of produced fluids treatment. Due to decline in production rates in oilfields new technologies are being developed and field tested in pilots. Polymer flooding is one such technology that involves addition of polymers to injection fluids to enhance oil production. A polymer flood pilot has been set up in the Schrader Bluff viscous oil reservoir at Milne Point field on the Alaska North Slope (ANS). The results from the pilot are encouraging, however a major concern of the operator is the influence of polymer on the production system after breakthrough, especially the fouling in heat exchangers. This study investigates the propensity of polymer fouling on the heater tubes as a function of different variables, with the ultimate goal of determining safe and efficient operating conditions. This work applies a multi-experimental approach to study the severity of polymer-induced fouling in both dynamic and static states of produced fluids as well as studying the stability of polymer solutions at different temperatures. A unique experimental setup was designed and developed in-house to simulate the fouling process on the heating tube. The influence of heating tube skin temperature, tube material, and polymer concentration on fouling tendency was investigated. Each test was run five times with the same tube, and in each run, the freshly prepared synthetic brine and polymer solution was heated from 77°F to 122°F to mimic field-operating conditions. The heating time and fouling amount were recorded for each run. Dynamic Scale Loop (DSL) tests were conducted to study fouling due to polymer at different temperatures (165°F to 350°F) in a dynamic state of fluid flow where the fluids mimic the residence time of fluids in the heat exchanger on the field pilot. Cloud point measurement has also been conducted to find the critical temperature at which the polymer in solution becomes unstable and precipitates out. The morphology and composition of the deposit samples were analyzed by environmental scanning electron microscopy (ESEM) and X-ray diffraction (XRD), respectively. It was found that the presence of polymer in produced fluids would aggravate the fouling issues on both carbon steel and stainless-steel surfaces at all tested skin temperatures. Only higher skin temperatures of 250°F and 350°F could cause polymer-induced fouling issues on the copper tube surface, and the fouling tendency increased with polymer concentration. At the lower skin temperatures of 165°F, no polymer-induced fouling was identified on the copper tube. A critical temperature that is related to the cloud point of the polymer solution was believed to exist, below which polymer-induced fouling would not occur, and only mineral scale was deposited but above which the polymer would aggravate the fouling issue. The cloud point of the tested polymer solution was determined to be between 220°F and 230°F. In the DSL tests it was found that at higher skin temperatures of 250°F and 350°F tube blocking was observed in the DSL tests whereas the tests at 165°F and 200°F did not show any tube blocking in the same time period. These experiments also manifested the influence of cloud point of the solution as deposit rate increased significantly in both carbon steel and stainless-steel tubes when the skin temperature was higher than the solution cloud point. The results of this study have provided guidance to the operator for the field-operations.
Author: Zhouyuan Zhu
Publisher: Stanford University
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 237
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Book Description
Simulating thermal processes is usually computationally expensive because of the complexity of the problem and strong nonlinearities encountered. In this work, we explore novel and efficient simulation techniques to solve thermal enhanced oil recovery problems. We focus on two major topics: the extension of streamline simulation for thermal enhanced oil recovery and the efficient simulation of chemical reaction kinetics as applied to the in-situ combustion process. For thermal streamline simulation, we first study the extension to hot water flood processes, in which we have temperature induced viscosity changes and thermal volume changes. We first compute the pressure field on an Eulerian grid. We then solve for the advective parts of the mass balance and energy equations along the individual streamlines, accounting for the compressibility effects. At the end of each global time step, we account for the nonadvective terms on the Eulerian grid along with gravity using operator splitting. We test our streamline simulator and compare the results with a commercial thermal simulator. Sensitivity studies for compressibility, gravity and thermal conduction effects are presented. We further extended our thermal streamline simulation to steam flooding. Steam flooding exhibits large volume changes and compressibility associated with the phase behavior of steam, strong gravity segregation and override, and highly coupled energy and mass transport. To overcome these challenges we implement a novel pressure update along the streamlines, a Glowinski scheme operator splitting and a preliminary streamline/finite volume hybrid approach. We tested our streamline simulator on a series of test cases. We compared our thermal streamline results with those computed by a commercial thermal simulator for both accuracy and efficiency. For the cases investigated, we are able to retain solution accuracy, while reducing computational cost and gaining connectivity information from the streamlines. These aspects are useful for reservoir engineering purposes. In traditional thermal reactive reservoir simulation, mass and energy balance equations are solved numerically on discretized reservoir grid blocks. The reaction terms are calculated through Arrhenius kinetics using cell-averaged properties, such as averaged temperature and reactant concentrations. For the in-situ combustion process, the chemical reaction front is physically very narrow, typically a few inches thick. To capture accurately this front, centimeter-sized grids are required that are orders of magnitude smaller than the affordable grid block sizes for full field reservoir models. To solve this grid size effect problem, we propose a new method based on a non-Arrhenius reaction upscaling approach. We do not resolve the combustion front on the grid, but instead use a subgrid-scale model that captures the overall effects of the combustion reactions on flow and transport, i.e. the amount of heat released, the amount of oil burned and the reaction products generated. The subgrid-scale model is calibrated using fine-scale highly accurate numerical simulation and laboratory experiments. This approach significantly improves the computational speed of in-situ combustion simulation as compared to traditional methods. We propose the detailed procedures to implement this methodology in a field-scale simulator. Test cases illustrate the solution consistency when scaling up the grid sizes in multidimensional heterogeneous problems. The methodology is also applicable to other subsurface reactive flow modeling problems with fast chemical reactions and sharp fronts. Displacement front stability is a major concern in the design of all the enhanced oil recovery processes. Historically, premature combustion front break through has been an issue for field operations of in-situ combustion. In this work, we perform detailed analysis based on both analytical methods and numerical simulation. We identify the different flow regimes and several driving fronts in a typical 1D ISC process. For the ISC process in a conventional mobile heavy oil reservoir, we identify the most critical front as the front of steam plateau driving the cold oil bank. We discuss the five main contributors for this front stability/instability: viscous force, condensation, heat conduction, coke plugging and gravity. Detailed numerical tests are performed to test and rank the relative importance of all these different effects.
Author: Ramasamy Marappa Gounder
Publisher:
ISBN: 1839684097
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 274
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Book Description
Author: Vladimir Alvarado
Publisher: Gulf Professional Publishing
ISBN: 1856178560
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 209
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Book Description
Enhanced-Oil Recovery (EOR) evaluations focused on asset acquisition or rejuvenation involve a combination of complex decisions, using different data sources. EOR projects have been traditionally associated with high CAPEX and OPEX, as well as high financial risk, which tend to limit the number of EOR projects launched. In this book, the authors propose workflows for EOR evaluations that account for different volumes and quality of information. This flexible workflow has been successfully applied to oil property evaluations and EOR feasibility studies in many oil reservoirs. The methodology associated with the workflow relies on traditional (look-up tables, XY correlations, etc.) and more advanced (data mining for analog reservoir search and geology indicators) screening methods, emphasizing identification of analogues to support decision making. The screening phase is combined with analytical or simplified numerical simulations to estimate full-field performance by using reservoir data-driven segmentation procedures. - Case Studies form Asia, Canada, Mexico, South America and the United States - Assets evaluated include reservoir types ranging from oil sands to condensate reservoirs - Different stages of development and information availability are discussed
Author: Robert B. Jansen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Dam failures
Languages : en
Pages : 348
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Book Description
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Petroleum engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 516
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Book Description
Author: Marathon Oil Company
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Oil field flooding
Languages : en
Pages : 88
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Book Description
Author: Jia'en Lin
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9811508607
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 501
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Book Description
This book is a compilation of selected papers from the 3rd International Petroleum and Petrochemical Technology Conference (IPPTC 2019). The work focuses on petroleum & petrochemical technologies and practical challenges in the field. It creates a platform to bridge the knowledge gap between China and the world. The conference not only provides a platform to exchanges experience but also promotes the development of scientific research in petroleum & petrochemical technologies. The book will benefit a broad readership, including industry experts, researchers, educators, senior engineers and managers.
Author: Sathish Sankaran
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781613998205
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 108
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Book Description
Data Analytics in Reservoir Engineering describes the relevance of data analytics for the oil and gas industry, with particular emphasis on reservoir engineering.
