Improving CO2 storage and oil recovery by injecting alcohol-treated CO2

2020 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 662
Author(s):  
Saira ◽  
Furqan Le-Hussain

Oil recovery and CO2 storage related to CO2 enhance oil recovery are dependent on CO2 miscibility. In case of a depleted oil reservoir, reservoir pressure is not sufficient to achieve miscible or near-miscible condition. This extended abstract presents numerical studies to delineate the effect of alcohol-treated CO2 injection on enhancing miscibility, CO2 storage and oil recovery at immiscible and near-miscible conditions. A compositional reservoir simulator from Computer Modelling Group Ltd. was used to examine the effect of alcohol-treated CO2 on the recovery mechanism. A SPE-5 3D model was used to simulate oil recovery and CO2 storage at field scale for two sets of fluid pairs: (1) pure CO2 and decane and (2) alcohol-treated CO2 and decane. Alcohol-treated CO2 consisted of a mixture of 4 wt% of ethanol and 96 wt% of CO2. All simulations were run at constant temperature (70°C), whereas pressures were determined using a pressure-volume-temperature simulator for immiscible (1400 psi) and near-miscible (1780 psi) conditions. Simulation results reveal that alcohol-treated CO2 injection is found superior to pure CO2 injection in oil recovery (5–9%) and CO2 storage efficiency (4–6%). It shows that alcohol-treated CO2 improves CO2 sweep efficiency. However, improvement in sweep efficiency with alcohol-treated CO2 is more pronounced at higher pressures, whereas improvement in displacement efficiency is more pronounced at lower pressures. The proposed methodology has potential to enhance the feasibility of CO2 sequestration in depleted oil reservoirs and improve both displacement and sweep efficiency of CO2.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (17) ◽  
pp. 7907
Author(s):  
Hye-Seung Lee ◽  
Jinhyung Cho ◽  
Young-Woo Lee ◽  
Kun-Sang Lee

Injecting CO2, a greenhouse gas, into the reservoir could be beneficial economically, by extracting remaining oil, and environmentally, by storing CO2 in the reservoir. CO2 captured from various sources always contains various impurities that affect the gas–oil system in the reservoir, changing oil productivity and CO2 geological storage performance. Therefore, it is necessary to examine the effect of impurities on both enhanced oil recovery (EOR) and carbon capture and storage (CCS) performance. For Canada Weyburn W3 fluid, a 2D compositional simulation of water-alternating-gas (WAG) injection was conducted to analyze the effect of impure CO2 on EOR and CCS performance. Most components in the CO2 stream such as CH4, H2, N2, O2, and Ar can unfavorably increase the MMP between the oil and gas mixture, while H2S decreased the MMP. MMP changed according to the type and concentration of impurity in the CO2 stream. Impurities in the CO2 stream also decreased both sweep efficiency and displacement efficiency, increased the IFT between gas and reservoir fluid, and hindered oil density reduction. The viscous gravity number increased by 59.6%, resulting in a decrease in vertical sweep efficiency. In the case of carbon storage, impurities decreased the performance of residual trapping by 4.1% and solubility trapping by 5.6% compared with pure CO2 WAG. As a result, impurities in CO2 reduced oil recovery by 9.2% and total CCS performance by 4.3%.



e-Polymers ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-68
Author(s):  
Dong Zhang ◽  
Jian Guang Wei ◽  
Run Nan Zhou

AbstractActive-polymer attracted increasing interest as an enhancing oil recovery technology in oilfield development owing to the characteristics of polymer and surfactant. Different types of active functional groups, which grafted on the polymer branched chain, have different effects on the oil displacement performance of the active-polymers. In this article, the determination of molecular size and viscosity of active-polymers were characterized by Scatterer and Rheometer to detect the expanded swept volume ability. And the Leica microscope was used to evaluate the emulsifying property of the active-polymers, which confirmed the oil sweep efficiency. Results show that the Type I active-polymer have a greater molecular size and stronger viscosity, which is a profile control system for expanding the swept volume. The emulsification performance of Type III active-polymer is more stable, which is suitable for improving the oil cleaning efficiency. The results obtained in this paper reveal the application prospect of the active-polymer to enhance oil recovery in the development of oilfields.



Author(s):  
Zheming Zhang ◽  
Ramesh Agarwal

With recent concerns on CO2 emissions from coal fired electricity generation plants; there has been major emphasis on the development of safe and economical Carbon Dioxide Capture and Sequestration (CCS) technology worldwide. Saline reservoirs are attractive geological sites for CO2 sequestration because of their huge capacity for sequestration. Over the last decade, numerical simulation codes have been developed in U.S, Europe and Japan to determine a priori the CO2 storage capacity of a saline aquifer and provide risk assessment with reasonable confidence before the actual deployment of CO2 sequestration can proceed with enormous investment. In U.S, TOUGH2 numerical simulator has been widely used for this purpose. However at present it does not have the capability to determine optimal parameters such as injection rate, injection pressure, injection depth for vertical and horizontal wells etc. for optimization of the CO2 storage capacity and for minimizing the leakage potential by confining the plume migration. This paper describes the development of a “Genetic Algorithm (GA)” based optimizer for TOUGH2 that can be used by the industry with good confidence to optimize the CO2 storage capacity in a saline aquifer of interest. This new code including the TOUGH2 and the GA optimizer is designated as “GATOUGH2”. It has been validated by conducting simulations of three widely used benchmark problems by the CCS researchers worldwide: (a) Study of CO2 plume evolution and leakage through an abandoned well, (b) Study of enhanced CH4 recovery in combination with CO2 storage in depleted gas reservoirs, and (c) Study of CO2 injection into a heterogeneous geological formation. Our results of these simulations are in excellent agreement with those of other researchers obtained with different codes. The validated code has been employed to optimize the proposed water-alternating-gas (WAG) injection scheme for (a) a vertical CO2 injection well and (b) a horizontal CO2 injection well, for optimizing the CO2 sequestration capacity of an aquifer. These optimized calculations are compared with the brute force nearly optimized results obtained by performing a large number of calculations. These comparisons demonstrate the significant efficiency and accuracy of GATOUGH2 as an optimizer for TOUGH2. This capability holds a great promise in studying a host of other problems in CO2 sequestration such as how to optimally accelerate the capillary trapping, accelerate the dissolution of CO2 in water or brine, and immobilize the CO2 plume.



2018 ◽  
Vol 140 (10) ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhanxi Pang ◽  
Peng Qi ◽  
Fengyi Zhang ◽  
Taotao Ge ◽  
Huiqing Liu

Heavy oil is an important hydrocarbon resource that plays a great role in petroleum supply for the world. Co-injection of steam and flue gas can be used to develop deep heavy oil reservoirs. In this paper, a series of gas dissolution experiments were implemented to analyze the properties variation of heavy oil. Then, sand-pack flooding experiments were carried out to optimize injection temperature and injection volume of this mixture. Finally, three-dimensional (3D) flooding experiments were completed to analyze the sweep efficiency and the oil recovery factor of flue gas + steam flooding. The role in enhanced oil recovery (EOR) mechanisms was summarized according to the experimental results. The results show that the dissolution of flue gas in heavy oil can largely reduce oil viscosity and its displacement efficiency is obviously higher than conventional steam injection. Flue gas gradually gathers at the top to displace remaining oil and to decrease heat loss of the reservoir top. The ultimate recovery is 49.49% that is 7.95% higher than steam flooding.



Energies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (23) ◽  
pp. 6456
Author(s):  
Ewa Knapik ◽  
Katarzyna Chruszcz-Lipska

Worldwide experiences related to geological CO2 storage show that the process of the injection of carbon dioxide into depleted oil reservoirs (CCS-EOR, Carbon Capture and Storage—Enhanced Oil Recovery) is highly profitable. The injection of CO2 will allow an increasing recovery factor (thus increasing CCS process profitability) and revitalize mature reservoirs, which may lead to oil spills due to pressure buildups. In Poland, such a solution has not yet been implemented in the industry. This work provides additional data for analysis of the possibility of the CCS-EOR method’s implementation for three potential clusters of Polish oil reservoirs located at a short distance one from another. The aim of the work was to examine the properties of reservoir fluids for these selected oil reservoirs in order to assure a better understanding of the physicochemical phenomena that accompany the gas injection process. The chemical composition of oils was determined by gas chromatography. All tested oils represent a medium black oil type with the density ranging from 795 to 843 g/L and the viscosity at 313 K, varying from 1.95 to 5.04 mm/s. The content of heavier components C25+ is up to 17 wt. %. CO2–oil MMP (Minimum Miscibility Pressure) was calculated in a CHEMCAD simulator using the Soave–Redlich–Kwong equation of state (SRK EoS). The oil composition was defined as a mixture of n-alkanes. Relatively low MMP values (ca. 8.3 MPa for all tested oils at 313 K) indicate a high potential of the EOR method, and make this geological CO2 storage form more attractive to the industry. For reservoir brines, the content of the main ions was experimentally measured and CO2 solubility under reservoir conditions was calculated. The reservoir brines showed a significant variation in properties with total dissolved solids contents varying from 17.5 to 378 g/L. CO2 solubility in brines depends on reservoir conditions and brine chemistry. The highest calculated CO2 solubility is 1.79 mol/kg, which suggest possible CO2 storage in aquifers.



2005 ◽  
Vol 20 (6) ◽  
pp. 1131-1157 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Emberley ◽  
I. Hutcheon ◽  
M. Shevalier ◽  
K. Durocher ◽  
B. Mayer ◽  
...  


2010 ◽  
Vol 13 (05) ◽  
pp. 791-804 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Taggart

Summary The solubility of carbon dioxide (CO2) in underground saline formations is considered to offer significant long-term storage capability to effectively sequester large amounts of anthropogenic CO2. Unlike enhanced oil recovery (EOR), geosequestration relies on longer time scales and involves significantly greater volumes of CO2. Many geosequestration studies assume that the initial brine state is one containing no dissolved hydrocarbons and, therefore, apply simplistic two-component solubility models starting from a zero dissolved-gas state. Many brine formations near hydrocarbons, however, tend to be close to saturation by methane (CH4). The introduction of excess CO2 in such systems results in an extraction of the CH4 into the CO2-rich phase, which, in turn, has implications for monitoring of any sequestration project and offers the possibly additional CH4 mobilization and recovery.



2013 ◽  
Vol 734-737 ◽  
pp. 1272-1275
Author(s):  
Ji Hong Zhang ◽  
Zhi Ming Zhang ◽  
Xi Ling Chen ◽  
Qing Bin He ◽  
Jin Feng Li

Nanometer microspheres injection is a new deep profile control technology. Nanometer microspheres could inflate with water, resulting in plugging step by step in reservoirs, which could improve the swept efficiency in the reservoir and enhance oil recovery. By using non-homogeneous rectangular core, oil displacement efficiency experiment was conducted for studying the influence of different injection methods on the effect of injection nanometer microspheres. The experimental result shows that, compared with development effect of single-slug injection or triple-slug injection, the one of double-slug injection is better. Nanometer microspheres can enhance oil recovery significantly in medium and low permeability reservoir.



2016 ◽  
Vol 2016 ◽  
pp. 1-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emad W. Al-Shalabi ◽  
B. Ghosh

Oil recovery prediction and field pilot implements require basic understanding and estimation of displacement efficiency. Corefloods and glass micromodels are two of the commonly used experimental methods to achieve this. In this paper, waterflood recovery is investigated using layered etched glass micromodel and Berea sandstone core plugs with large permeability contrasts. This study focuses mainly on the effect of permeability (heterogeneity) in stratified porous media with no cross-flow. Three experimental setups were designed to represent uniformly stratified oil reservoir with vertical discontinuity in permeability. Waterflood recovery to residual oil saturation (Sor) is measured through glass micromodel (to aid visual observation), linear coreflood, and forced drainage-imbibition processes by ultracentrifuge. Six oil samples of low-to-medium viscosity and porous media of widely different permeability (darcy and millidarcy ranges) were chosen for the study. The results showed that waterflood displacement efficiencies are consistent in both permeability ranges, namely, glass micromodel and Berea sandstone core plugs. Interestingly, the experimental results show that the low permeability zones resulted in higher ultimate oil recovery compared to high permeability zones. At Sor microheterogeneity and fingering are attributed for this phenomenon. In light of the findings, conformance control is discussed for better sweep efficiency. This paper may be of help to field operators to gain more insight into microheterogeneity and fingering phenomena and their impact on waterflood recovery estimation.



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