Abstract
Immiscible carbon dioxide (CO2) injection is one of the highly applied enhanced oil recovery (EOR) methods due to its high oil recovery potential and its ability to store CO2 in the reservoir. The main mechanism of immiscible CO2 injection is oil swelling. Generally, oil swelling is measured experimentally or measured using modeling methods. This research conducts oil swelling experiments using a simplified method in order to easily and accurately measure oil swelling and determines some of the most significant factors that may impact oil swelling during CO2 injection. The impact of varying CO2 injection pressure, temperature, oil viscosity and oil volume on oil swelling capacity was investigated. The simplified method managed to accurately determine the value of oil swelling for all the experiments. One of the factors that was found to impact the method significantly was the oil volume used. The oil volume in the experimental vessel was found to be extremely important since a large oil volume may result in a false oil swelling value. The oil swelling results were compared to other researches and showed that the method applied had an accuracy of over 90% for all the results obtained. This research introduces a simple method that can be used to measure oil swelling and applies this method to investigate some of the factors that may impact the oil swelling capacity during immiscible CO2 injection.
Highlights
Carbon dioxide injection is currently one of the many applied enhanced oil recovery (EOR) techniques due to its multiple advantages, including its ability to increase oil recovery and its potential for carbon storage in the hydrocarbon reservoirs (Fakher et al 2017; 2018a, b; 2019a, b, c; Martin and Taber 1992; Verma 2015; Perera et al 2016; Fakher, 2019a, b). CO2 can be either miscible or immiscible with the reservoir hydrocarbons based on the reservoir conditions and properties and the CO2 properties and injection procedure (Fakher and Imqam 2018; 2019a, b)
This research investigates the extent to which the crude oil will swell under different conditions and the impact of different factors on oil swelling, including CO2 injection pressure, experimental vessel temperature, crude oil viscosity and crude oil volume in the experimental vessel using a simplified oil swelling measurement technique
The main conclusions obtained from this research are as follows: 1. The oil swelling values that were obtained using the simplified method applied in this research were compared to several oil swelling values obtained from the literature and were found to follow the overall trend of the data points, which indicates that the method that was used had a high level of accuracy
Summary
Carbon dioxide injection is currently one of the many applied EOR techniques due to its multiple advantages, including its ability to increase oil recovery and its potential for carbon storage in the hydrocarbon reservoirs (Fakher et al 2017; 2018a, b; 2019a, b, c; Martin and Taber 1992; Verma 2015; Perera et al 2016; Fakher, 2019a, b). CO2 can be either miscible or immiscible with the reservoir hydrocarbons based on the reservoir conditions and properties and the CO2 properties and injection procedure (Fakher and Imqam 2018; 2019a, b). Immiscible C O2 injection has currently gained much attention due to its ability to increase oil recovery from several types of oil reservoirs, including heavy oil reservoirs (Nourozieh et al 2016; Fakher 2019a, b). The main mechanism by which immiscible CO2 injection can increase oil recovery is oil swelling (Fakher et al 2018a, b; 2019a, b, c). During this interaction, the C O2 partially dissolves in the crude oil and results in an increase in the volume of the crude oil due to CO2 dissolution.
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