Abstract
Heavy Oil and VAPEX Process: A Brief Review
Highlights
Viscous heavy oil cannot be recovered without the aid of an external resource like heat or solvents
Steam assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) process is a thermal process where steam is used as a heat source to reduce the viscosity of heavy oil to ~1cp
There are a large number of diffusivity data of solvents in heavy oil
Summary
Viscous heavy oil (above 100 cp) cannot be recovered without the aid of an external resource like heat or solvents. When a solvent molecule or a segment of oil moves, it has to overcome an Arrhenius type of activation energy barrier As a result, both diffusivity and viscosity show such temperature dependence. There are a large number of diffusivity data of solvents in heavy oil The difficulty with these is that to obtain diffusivity, one needs the solution to a boundary value problem where the diffusivity is a strong function of solvent concentration. The convective-diffusive transport in an oil reservoir of the configuration in Figure 1 was first given by Butler and Mokrys (1989) It provides the recovery rate of where ΔSois the difference between the fractional pore volume containing oil before and after displacement. The phase separation was very quick, but some water was left in the oil and did not separate in a day’s time, because of high viscosity of oil
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