Dry Heat Recovery Enhancement of Wafra Eocene Using Conventional Temperatures

Abstract

Eocene-Wafra is a heavy oil reservoir that is producing 17-21 API oil. This carbonate-dolomite reservoir has substantial amounts of this heavy oil and has low primary recovery, which is a candidate for steam recovery. However, current high quality steam recovery campaign is facing serious technical challenges such as expensive, inefficient and limited supply of fresh water for the injection, which make other unconventional recovery plans more attractive to increase the recovery. This study will address a dry heat recovery mechanism of a synthetic reservoir media with real Eocene dead oil samples collected from the Eocene-Wafra reservoir. After mimicking the reservoir with the oil and water samples, an investigation study of subjecting the synthetic physical heavy oil reservoir into several designed conventional field temperatures to find the optimum recovery rate. The main objective of this study is finding the optimum recovery rate using dry heat instead of expensive, inefficient and limited supply water of wet steam recovery.