High-pressure phase equilibrium and volumetric properties of pseudo-binary mixtures of stock tank oil + methane up to 463K

Abstract

High-pressure phase equilibrium and volumetric properties of highly asymmetric mixtures related to reservoir fluids are critical to the development of high-pressure and high-temperature (HPHT) reservoirs. However, there is a lack of the relevant data and accurate modeling tools. In this work, we prepared asymmetric pseudo-binary mixtures of methane (CH4) + stock tank oil (STO) and systematically measured their phase equilibrium and densities at temperatures from (298.15 to 463.15) K and pressures up to 140 MPa. The methane mole fraction in these mixtures range from 0.20 to 0.61 for the density measurement, and from 0.20 to 0.81 for the phase equilibrium measurement. From the experimental densities, the isothermal compressibility values, as well as the pseudo-excess volumes, were determined. Moreover, phase envelopes, relative volumes, and liquid volume fractions below the saturation point were also measured. These data are valuable for evaluating and improving thermodynamic models for HPHT reservoir fluids. The experimental results were modeled by the Soave-Redlich-Kwong (SRK) equation of state (EoS), the Peng-Robinson (PR) equation of state, their volume translated versions SRK-VT and PR-VT, and the Perturbed Chain Statistical Associating Fluid Theory (PC-SAFT). For density, SRK and PR gave large deviations of ~18% and ~8%, respectively, as compared with ~3% for PC-SAFT. Inclusion of volume translation reduced their deviations to the same level as that for PC-SAFT. For isothermal compressibility, all the models gave deviations of 20-30%, with PC-SAFT, SRK-VT and PR-VT being slightly better. The excess volumes calculated by SRK, PR and PC-SAFT were similar and close to the experimental values. The deviations in the calculated excess volumes resulted in only ~1% deviations in the calculated densities if the experimentally determined STO densities were used. It was illustrated that the small deviations could be utilized in the excess volume method to accurately estimate the high-pressure live oil densities from the high-pressure STO densities. This excess volume method gave ~1% density deviation on average for all the models, with PC-SAFT giving the smallest maximum deviation. The deviations in calculated saturation pressures were ~5% for all the models with the overall deviation for PC-SAFT being slightly smaller.