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Numerical Modelling Study for Designing CO2-Foam Field Pilot
- Publisher: European Association of Geoscientists & Engineers
- Source: Conference Proceedings, IOR 2017 - 19th European Symposium on Improved Oil Recovery, Apr 2017, Volume 2017, p.1 - 15
Abstract
Carbon dioxide has been successfully used in fields as EOR agent; and because of technical, commercial and environmental reasons, it has received considerable attention in recent years over other solvents. Based on experience with CO2 flooding worldwide, it is well understood that despite its high local displacement efficiency, the process suffers from poor sweep efficiency due to reservoir heterogeneity, viscous instability and gravity override. Application of foam has been found to mitigate these limitations at laboratory scale, however understanding of CO2-Foam flow behaviour at a larger scale is limited industrywide. Some of the previous pilots have shown technical success especially near wellbore, but there exist a need to establish an integrated methodology to scale-up the CO2-Foam technology efficiently and effectively.
As part of an ongoing research program, we have identified a field with heterogeneous carbonate reservoir onshore in west Texas, USA to run CO2-Foam field trial. The research emphasizes on implementing a modelling, monitoring and verification approach as part of the roadmap. Static model created by integrating petrophysical logs and core data in-line with geologic framework, and dynamic model created based on analysis of reservoir engineering data including RCA, SCAL, PVT, pressure data and coreflood experiments forms the basis for reservoir simulation study for the pilot area. In this paper, we provide an overview of different elements of numerical model and demonstrate application of a probabilistic framework to incorporate the uncertainties associated with model inputs. The success will be validated via appropriate monitoring plan in the ongoing pilot research program.