Abstract
Cyclic steam stimulation (CSS) is one of the popular methods to recovery heavy oil reserves that play an important role in supplying the energy consumption over the world. To solve the problems during the late CSS, we perform the feasibility study of hot-water flooding (HWF) after CSS with laboratory experiments and numerical simulation. The experimental results revealed the optimized water temperature to conduct HWF is 120 °C and the correct moment to convert is when the oil recovery of steam injection reaches 20%. Based on the geological properties of Jinlou oilfield in China, a series of numerical simulations were run to analyze the influence of several sensitive factors. It is necessary to transform development method because there are large quantities of remaining oil assembling at the inter-well region during the late stage of CSS and this after analyzing the oil saturation, reservoir temperature and oil viscosity distribution. The effect of HWF in reverse-rhythm and compound-rhythm reservoir is satisfactory, but is poor in positive-rhythm reservoir. It is suitable to reservoirs with thickness lower than 5 m and permeability variation coefficient less than 0.3. This study can provide a reference for enhanced oil recovery for thin heavy oil reservoirs after steam injection.
Highlights
With the development of global economy, oil demand increases rapidly
150 °C) is 17.35%, 20.27%, 22.98%, 26.39% and 29.98%, respectively. It shows that the oil production period increases first and declines with the increase of temperature, and the temperature inflection point is 120 °C
This is because the viscosity ratio between oil and water is higher at lower temperatures, which results in water channeling in the tube, leading to poor development effect
Summary
As conventional oils have been developed in the past several decades, the heavy oil has attracted worldwide attention due to its abundant reserves. The techniques that are applied for enhanced heavy oil recovery attract extensive attention. There are two main development patterns for heavy oil reservoirs, cold production and thermal production. The cold production methods include natural depletion, water flooding and chemical flooding (e.g., gas flooding, surfactant flooding, polymer flooding, alkali flooding, ASP compound flooding and foam flooding) which is applied to heavy oil reservoirs with relatively low MOE Key Laboratory of Tectonics and Petroleum Resources, China University of Geosciences, Wuhan 430074, Hubei, People’s Republic of China. While the thermal recovery is the fundamental method used for heavy oil reservoirs with high viscosity and it mainly includes two kinds of reservoir heating types. CSS and SF are the most widely used
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
