Simulation of Waterflooding, Carbon Dioxide Flooding and WaterAlternating-Carbon Dioxide in Heavy Oil Rservoir: Comparative Evaluation
Wantanee Teerasukakula, Chintana Saiwana1, Farshid Torabib
aPetroleum
and Petrochemical College, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok 10330, Thailand
bUniversity
of Regina, SK, Canada S4S 0A2
From the statistical review of world energy indicated that the global oil
production is still not enough for the global oil consumptions. Therefore, this problem
leads to consider in the unconventional resources including heavy oil. This work
investigates a compartative evaluation of three oil recovery processes of waterflooding,
carbon dioxide (CO2) flooding, and water-alternating-carbon dioxide (CO2-WAG) to
enhance heavy oil recovery based on laboratory experiment and simulation. In the
experiment, it was designed by using two different sand packs which were used to
acquire different permeability of 12 and 40 darcy. Eleven experiments were operated at
low injection pressure of 345 kpa and low temperature of 25 C on two different oil
viscosity of 440 cp and 1500 cp. A hybrid grid system from IMEG CMG was used and a
grid refinement option was applied in order to model the radial flow parallel to horizontal
well. The experimental results indicated that waterflooding could produce the highest
recovery factors for both type of oil and sand packs. The oil viscosity yielded the effect
of oil recovery more than the absolute permeability for all types of oil recovery methods.
The simulation results showed the same trends of oil production in experimental data.
Keywords: Heavy oil, Waterflooding, Carbon dioxide (CO2) flooding, WaterAlternating-CO2 (CO2-WAG),
* Corresponding author. Tel.: +662-218-4137; fax: +662-215-4459.
E-mail address: Chintana.sa@chula.ac.th.