Integration of Profile Control and Thermal Recovery to Enhance Heavy Oil Recovery

Qiuxia Wang, Wei Zheng, Jinxiang Liu (), Bao Cao, Jingbin Hao, Xiangguo Lu, Kaiqi Zheng, Longchao Cui, Tianyu Cui and Huiru Sun
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Qiuxia Wang: State Key Laboratory for Efficient Development of Offshore Oil, Beijing 100028, China
Wei Zheng: State Key Laboratory for Efficient Development of Offshore Oil, Beijing 100028, China
Jinxiang Liu: State Key Laboratory for Efficient Development of Offshore Oil, Beijing 100028, China
Bao Cao: Hainan Branch of CNOOC (China) Co., Ltd., Haikou 570311, China
Jingbin Hao: State Key Laboratory for Efficient Development of Offshore Oil, Beijing 100028, China
Xiangguo Lu: State Key Laboratory for Efficient Development of Offshore Oil, Beijing 100028, China
Kaiqi Zheng: State Key Laboratory for Efficient Development of Offshore Oil, Beijing 100028, China
Longchao Cui: State Key Laboratory for Efficient Development of Offshore Oil, Beijing 100028, China
Tianyu Cui: State Key Laboratory for Efficient Development of Offshore Oil, Beijing 100028, China
Huiru Sun: State Key Laboratory for Efficient Development of Offshore Oil, Beijing 100028, China

Energies, 2022, vol. 15, issue 19, 1-16

Abstract: The proven reserves of heavy oil in the Bohai oilfield exceed 600 million tons. Heavy oil is highly viscous, temperature sensitive, and suitable for thermal extraction, but due to the strong inhomogeneity of the reservoir, the recovery rate of pure thermal extraction development is low, and there is an urgent need to conduct research on profile control + thermal extraction to guide the actual production. In this paper, we propose an integrated technology of profile control and thermal recovery to enhance heavy oil recovery. The heavy oil exhibited strong temperature dependence and nonlinear flow characteristics. An inorganic gel was selected for profile control to assist thermal recovery. Thermal recovery experiments were conducted in the laboratory using cores saturated by crude oil with different viscosities to simulate the oil in areas swept by thermal fluid. The 4% to 6% inorganic gel can seal up to 99% on 2000 × 10 −3 μm 2 cores. As the thermal recovery temperature increased from 55 to 200 °C, the efficiency of oil recovery increased from 10.8% to 42.9% in experiments with three-layer heterogeneous cores; it increased by 8.9–13.2% when profile control was implemented using the inorganic gel with a concentration of 4%. The injection parameters for thermal recovery were optimized with a thermal fluid swept area of 3/10 times the injector–producer distance, including three slugs of crude oil with different viscosities. According to the experiments involving an inverted nine-point well pattern, the integrated technology of profile control and thermal recovery enhances oil recovery by 1.4% compared to of profile control or thermal recovery alone.

Keywords: heavy oil; heterogeneous reservoirs; conformance control; inorganic gel; thermal recovery (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: 2022
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