Abstract
Natural earthquakes, culture noise, and artificially induced mechanical waves have been reported to affect the productivity of oil wells. Sources emitting waves in the seismic frequency range, between 1 and 1000 Hz, have been used as an enhanced oil recovery (EOR) tool for improving oil production rates. Theories suggest several mechanisms for the increased oil production rate including (AbuZaid et al., 2021): overcoming the capillary forces holding the oil phase in place (Alzahrani and Abbas, 2020), improving the relative permeability of oil, and (Ariadji, 2005) decreasing viscosity as temperature rises from waves attenuation. In this work, a fully implicit modified black oil simulator has been developed. The fluid flow simulator is coupled with a ray tracing module for simulating waves propagation in the model. Wave simulation is used to calculate the effect of seismic waves on capillary pressure, oil relative permeability, and reservoir temperature. It is also used to investigate the applicability of the proposed mechanisms for explaining the observed enhancement in oil recovery due to seismic waves. This seismic stimulation simulator can provide insights on the response of wells’ production rates at various field characteristics and seismic tool(s) operation conditions, explain field results, and design field implementation of seismic EOR.
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