INCREASING THE EFFICIENCY OF THE SAGD METHOD BY ADDING VARIOUS GASES

Abstract

Due to their low mobility in the reservoirs, heavy oils are very difficult to produce by conventional methods. That is why several specific techniques have been created by geoscientists, in order to produce those heavy oils which represent a significant part in the world primary energy resources. One recurrent principle among those methods is to heat the oil, or to modify its composition in order to reduce its viscosity. And then the resulting oil, more mobile flows toward the production wells thanks to the gravity force. The main problematics of this project are first to highlight the importance of gravity drainage in the production of heavy oil. And after that, how using the gravity to produce the maximum of oil? In other words, with a given reservoir model, what kind of addition of hydrocarbon gases or CO2 can we consider as improving effect for gravity mechanism of oil production. The goal of this study is to simulate the ES-SAGD, which stands for Expanded Solvent SAGD. Let’s keep in mind that the objective is to enhance oil recovery by changing its composition, and meanwhile decreasing its viscosity for example thanks to the injection of miscible gas. Through the different sections of this part, we will investigate the effects of injecting different solvents in our reservoir model. In the course of the study pure steam, CH4, C3H8 and CO2 cases and their different mixtures were considered during this research. Solvents that give the largest amount of oil recovered were identified.