Temperature and Composition Effect on CO2 Miscibility by Interfacial Tension Measurement

Abstract

Crude oil reservoirs have different temperatures, compositions, and pressures, therefore oil recovery performance by CO2 injection varies from one case to another. Furthermore, it is predicted that lower interfacial tension between injected CO2 and reservoir fluid results in more oil recovery. In this study, we investigate the effect of temperature on the equilibrium interfacial tension between CO2 and three different oil fluids at different pressures. Also minimum miscible pressure (MMP) is measured by the vanishing interfacial tension (VIT) technique to determine the temperature effect on the CO2 miscible gas injection. The results on different pure and mixtures of hydrocarbon fluids show that for pressures up to 5.2 MPa, the higher the temperature was, the lower was the interfacial tension (IFT) measured. However, for the cases with pressure higher than 5.2 MPa, as the temperature was increased, the IFT increased too. In addition the VIT technique is used to measure the MMP of CO2 and pure paraffin; the heavier paraffin was, the higher was the MMP noticed. Also, we have learned that paraffin groups have an important effect on multicomponent interfacial tension behavior.