Experimental Study of the Effect of Barriers on Heavy Oil Recovery during Hydrocarbon Solvent Injections

Although most of the heavy oil reservoirs contain discontinuous shaly structures, the effect of shale geometrical characteristics including: spacing from wells, discontinuity, orientation, shale's spacing and length on oil recovery factor in presence of gravity force are not well understood. In this work a series of solvent injection experiments were conducted on various vertical one-quarter five-spot glass micromodels containing barriers that are initially saturated with heavy oil under several fixed flow rate conditions. The oil recovery was measured by analysis of the pictures provided continuously during injection processes. The experimental data were used for developing and validating compositional-numerical model. The results indicated that the ultimate oil recovery in presence of shale was lower than that in homogeneous models. The oil recovery was greatly a function of shaly structure’s orientation and by increasing the barrier exposure with the main flow direction the solvent propagation decreased. The gravity force caused the solvent to be propagated better in the media. Lower distance of these barriers from production well reduced the final oilrecovery, but it acted conversely for the case of the injection well.

کلیدواژه ها:

Shaly structures ، Cold heavy oil production ، Micromodel ، Solvent injection