Compositional Simulation of CO2 Huff ’n’ Puff in Eagle Ford Tight Oil Reservoirs With CO2 Molecular Diffusion, Nanopore Confinement, and Complex Natural Fractures

Abstract

Summary Although numerous studies proved the potential of carbon dioxide (CO2) huff ’n’ puff, relatively few models exist to comprehensively and efficiently simulate CO2 huff ’n’ puff in a way that considers the effects of molecular diffusion, nanopore confinement, and complex fractures for CO2. The objective of this study was to introduce a numerical compositional model with an embedded-discrete-fracture-model (EDFM) method to simulate this process in an actual Eagle Ford tight oil well. Through nonneighboring connections (NNCs), the EDFM method can properly and efficiently handle any complex fracture geometries. We built a 3D reservoir model with six fluid pseudocomponents. We performed history-matching with measured flow rates and bottomhole pressure (BHP). Good agreements between field data, EDFM, and local grid refinement (LGR) were achieved. However, the EDFM method performed faster than the LGR method. After that, we evaluated the CO2-enhanced-oil-recovery (EOR) effectiveness for molecular diffusion and nanopore confinement effects. The traditional phase equilibrium calculation was modified to calculate the critical fluid properties with nanopore confinement. The simulation results showed that the CO2 EOR with larger diffusion coefficients performed better than the primary production. In addition, both effects were favorable for the CO2 huff ’n’ puff effectiveness. The relative increase of cumulative oil production after 20 years was approximately 12% for this well. Furthermore, when considering complex natural fractures, the relative increase of cumulative oil production was approximately 8%. This study provided critical insights into a better understanding of the impacts of CO2 molecular diffusion, nanopore confinement, and complex natural fractures on well performance during the CO2-EOR process in tight oil reservoirs.