A novel analytical technique for determining inflow control devices flow area in CO2-EOR and CCUS projects

Abstract

CO2-EOR is one of the principal techniques for enhanced oil recovery (EOR). The CO2 injection not only promotes oil recovery but also leads to greenhouse gas discharge reduction. Nonetheless, a key challenge in the CO2 flooding process is a premature CO2 breakthrough from highly permeable zones. In recent years, Inflow Control Devices, ICDs, have been used as a potential solution to mitigate an early gas breakthrough. The key and important parameter in ICDs installation is obtaining its opening flow area. The common ways to obtain the ICD flow area such as utilizing optimization algorithms are very complicated and time-consuming, and further these methods are not analytical. The aim of this work is to solve the mentioned challenges—postpone the breakthrough time in gas injection and present an easy, fast, and analytical technique for obtaining ICDs flow area. This paper presents a new analytical method for obtaining inflow control devices flow area for injection wells in an oil reservoir under CO2-EOR in order to balance the injected CO2 front movement in all layers. Then, in order to compare the advantages and disadvantages of the presented technique with other methods such as optimization algorithms, a case study has been done on a real reservoir model under CO2 injection. Later, the results of studied scenarios in the case studied are given and compared. The results show that by utilizing the proposed method recovery factor is raised by improving sweep efficiency, and the breakthrough time is more postponed compared to the other methods about 400 days. Further, the ICD flow area calculation takes 2 min by presented analytical techniques, but the optimization algorithm takes 4040 min to run the simulation model to find the ICD flow area. In the end, the findings of the presented analytical formula can help to set the ICD flow area very fast without the simulation and help researchers for a better quantitative understanding of parameters affecting the ICD flow area by the given formula such as reservoir permeability.