New Heat-Management Model for Steamflood Processes

Abstract

Abstract Steamflooding is one of the most efficient alternative for heavy oil recovery; in spite of that, the steam generation and treatment represent a large percentage of economic investment in the project. One of the main consequences of the costs associated with the technique is that it limits the lifetime of the project. In many cases, it is common to use high steam injection rates in order to obtain the highest oil recovery, however on many occasions that influence negatively the project profitability. Heat management ensures moreover as its name indicates optimize the energy injected into the reservoir with the objective of generate maximum profitability with lower injection rate. Until now, different authors have proposed some heat management analytical models, which aim to predict the energy injection rate required for the reservoir, including the thermal requirements of the rock-fluid system and the energy produced and lost. Given the need to generate greater applicability to heat management process, it has proposed a new heat management model (MMRC-Model). One of the most important characteristic is that the results of numerical reservoir simulation complemented the model, which favors their application in fields of different characteristics that will be included in the built of the reservoir simulation model. The implementation of this new model can efficiently calculate the energy requirements of the reservoir increasing the project profitability in 42% compared to a process of continuous steam injection at a constant rate. On the other hand it is important to emphasize that the implementation of the MMRC heat management model can increase the life of the project from 50% – 80%, thus allowing made changes in the injection rate can be made into longer periods of time depending on the thermal maturity of the reservoir. Finally, the model included a variable that any author had not been taken into account previously was the oil viscosity, which varies over a wide range in heavy oil reservoirs and influences the energy requirements.