Abstract
Condensate banking in natural gas reservoirs can hinder the productivity of production wells dramatically due to the multiphase flow behaviour around the wellbore. This phenomenon takes place when the reservoir pressure drops below the dew point pressure. In this work, we model this occurrence and investigate how the injection of CO2 can enhance the well productivity using novel discretization and linearization schemes such as mimetic finite difference and operator-based linearization from an in-house built compositional reservoir simulator. The injection of CO2 as an enhanced recovery technique is chosen to assess its value as a potential remedy to reduce carbon emissions associated with natural gas production. First, we model a base case with a single producer where we show the deposition of condensate banking around the well and the decline of pressure and production with time. In another case, we inject CO2 into the reservoir as an enhanced gas recovery mechanism. In both cases, we use fully tensor permeability and unstructured tetrahedral grids using mimetic finite difference (MFD) method. The results of the simulation show that the gas and condensate production rates drop after a certain production plateau, specifically the drop in the condensate rate by up to 46%. The introduction of a CO2 injector yields a positive impact on the productivity and pressure decline of the well, delaying the plateau by up to 1.5 years. It also improves the productivity index by above 35% on both the gas and condensate performance, thus reducing production rate loss on both gas and condensate by over 8% and the pressure, while in terms of pressure and drawdown, an improvement of 2.9 to 19.6% is observed per year.
Enhanced gas recovery by nitrogen injection: The effects of injection velocity during natural gas displacement in consolidated rocks
