Modeling of Pressure Dependence of Interfacial Tension Behaviors of Supercritical CO2 + Crude Oil Systems Using a Basic Parachor Expression

Abstract

Parachor based expressions (basic and mechanistic) are often used to model the experimentally observed pressure dependence of interfacial tension (IFT) behaviors of complex supercritical carbon dioxide (sc-CO2) and crude oil mixtures at elevated temperatures. However, such modeling requires various input data (e.g. compositions and densities of the equilibrium liquid and vapor phases, and molecular weights and diffusion coefficients for various components present in the system). In the absence of measured data, often phase behavior packages are used for obtaining these input data for performing calculations. Very few researchers have used experimentally measured input data for performing parachor based modeling of the experimental IFT behaviors of sc-CO2 and crude oil systems that are of particular interest to CO2 injection in porous media based enhanced oil recovery (EOR) operations.This study presents the results of parachor based modeling performed to predict pressure dependence of IFT behaviors of a complex sc-CO2 and crude oil system for which experimentally measured data is available in public domain. Though parachor model based on calculated IFT behaviors shows significant deviation from the measured behaviors in high IFT region, difference between the calculated and the experimental behaviors appears to vanish in low IFT region. These observations suggest that basic parachor expression based calculated IFT behaviors in low IFT region follow the experimental IFT behaviors more closely.An analysis of published studies (basic and mechanistic parachor expressions based on modeling of pressure dependence of IFT behaviors of both standard and complex sc-CO2 and crude oil systems) and the results of this study reinforce the need of better description of gas-oil interactions for robust modeling of pressure dependence of IFT behavior of these complex systems.