A comprehensive performance evaluation methodology for miscible gas flooding: A case study in a giant carbonate reservoir in Middle East

Abstract

This work focuses on a typical low-permeability carbonate reservoir in Middle East that has been developed by miscible hydrocarbon (HC) gas flooding for more than 10 years. The oilfield is now suffering from gas channeling, high gas/oil ratio (GOR), and invalid gas circulation. To figure out the reasons and propose an optimized development plan, it is necessary to accurately determine the characteristics and behavior of miscible gas flooding. To achieve this, a comprehensive performance evaluation method for miscible gas flooding is established in this work by integrating production data, inter-well gas tracer test, saturation surveillance, pressure surveillance, minimum miscibility pressure (MMP) variation, and streamline simulation. The following miscible HC gas flooding characteristics are interpreted, including typical gas flow path, miscibility behavior, major controlling factors impacting performance, and the main challenges of the current development scheme, which provides a fundament for proposing mitigation plan. By using this evaluation method, the behavior of gas flow in the ongoing miscible flooding process is precisely characterized, which is a “gravity override-gas coning” mode in which gas override is formed by an upward injected gas flow and then gas flows through gas cap to producers that leads to gas coning, resulting in high GOR and invalid gas circulation. This flow mode mainly resulted from the unsatisfied miscibility that led to gas escaping from miscible phase and gas channeling. Furthermore, it was found out that pressure difference is the dominating factor for gas channeling. In addition, we also found that MMP varies during HC gas injection process due to the change in the oil composition, which emphasizes the importance of recovering and maintaining pressure. Based on these findings obtained from extensive dynamic performance analysis and numerical simulations, an optimization strategy is finally proposed for improving the performance of miscible HC gas flooding.