PVT Properties and Viscosity Correlations for Gulf of Mexico Oils

Abstract

ABSTRACT New empirical PVT correlations for Gulf of Mexico (GOM) oils have been developed as a function of commonly available field data. Correlations have been developed for: bubblepoint pressure,solution gas oil ratio at bubblepoint pressure,oil formation volume factor at bubblepoint pressure,undersaturated isothermal oil compressibility, Oil Viscosity: dead oil viscosity,saturated oil viscosity, andundersaturated oil viscosity. For the development of correlations, we have covered a wide range of data. More than one hundred pressure-volume-temperature (PVT) reports from GOM have been used in the development of correlations. Two of the published correlations, Standing, and Petrosky and Farshad correlations were tested using our GOM data set. Proposed correlations of this study predicted the PVT properties of GOM oils better than the correlations published in the literature, even when the coefficients of the published correlations are tuned. Using the correlations of this study, we have written a simple program that can generate PVT datasets for use in reservoir simulation. Laboratory measured differential liberation data for two different oil samples were also compared against our empirically generated differential liberation data.