Huff-n-Puff Experimental Studies of CO 2 with Heavy Oil

Evgeny Shilov, Alexey Cheremisin, Kirill Maksakov and Sergey Kharlanov
Additional contact information
Evgeny Shilov: Center for Hydrocarbon Recovery, Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, Moscow 121205, Russia
Alexey Cheremisin: Center for Hydrocarbon Recovery, Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, Moscow 121205, Russia
Kirill Maksakov: Department of Technology Development for High Viscosity and Heavy Oils, LUKOIL-Engineering LCC, Moscow 109028, Russia
Sergey Kharlanov: Management Department of Scientific and Technical Projects, RITEK JSC, Moscow 115035, Russia

Energies, 2019, vol. 12, issue 22, 1-15

Abstract: This work is devoted to CO 2 Huff-n-Puff studies on heavy oil. Oil recovery for heavy oil reservoirs is sufficiently small in comparison with conventional reservoirs, and, due to the physical limitation of oil flow through porous media, a strong need for better understanding of tertiary recovery mechanisms of heavy oil exists. Notwithstanding that the idea of Huff-n-Puff gas injection technology for enhanced oil recovery has existed for dozens of years, there is still no any precise methodology for evaluating the applicability and efficiency of this technology in heavy oil reservoirs. Oil recovery factor is a question of vital importance for heavy oil reservoirs. In this work, we repeated Huff-n-Puff tests more than three times at five distinct pressure points to evaluate the applicability and efficiency of CO 2 Huff-n-Puff injection to the heavy oil reservoirs. Additionally, the most critical factor that affects oil recovery in gas injection operation is the condition of miscibility. Experimental data allowed to distinguish the mixing zone of the light fractions of studied heavy oil samples. The experimental results showed that the pressure increase in the Huff-n-Puff injection process does not affect the oil recovery when the injection pressure stays between miscibility pressure of light components of oil and minimum miscibility pressure. It was detected that permeability decreases after Huff-n-Puff CO 2 tests.

Keywords: enhanced oil recovery; CO 2 injection; heavy oil; Huff-n-Puff; miscibility evaluation; permeability reduction (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/12/22/4308/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/12/22/4308/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jeners:v:12:y:2019:i:22:p:4308-:d:286128

Access Statistics for this article

Energies is currently edited by Ms. Agatha Cao

More articles in Energies from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().