1887

Abstract

Summary

Primary production can be exploited to produce oils with viscosities up to 10,000 cp or even more and usually this stage is followed by water flooding. Since the water temperature is always lower than the temperature of the reservoir, a cooling process starts at this stage and this may continue many years before starting a thermal EOR technique to produce the residual oil which may exceed 50% of OOIP. Injecting a cold fluid may bring many changes into the reservoir, one of which is reservoir temperature change which is the main theme of this paper.

During our simulation of the cooling of the geothermal reservoirs, it has been observed that the natural thermal gradient will not be able to compensate for the decrease in temperature during a long period of injection of cold water. The same behavior has been observed in the case of water injection in oil reservoirs. This phenomenon has been reported since the fifties of the last century in some oilfields in the USA and confirmed by real data measurements at the bottom hole of some wells. This study illustrates numerically how the temperature will drop down on a long time scale. On the other hand, when a steam injection is planned for the next phase of production, a huge amount of energy will be needed to restore the temperature of the reservoir.

To illustrate the above-mentioned theory and observations, a model of a geothermal reservoir is solved to show the cooling process in 3D using a commercial finite element software package. SPE4 Benchmark model is used to compare the ultimate recovery by cold water injection scenario and steam injection counterpart. The temperature change of the reservoir in both cases is shown and compared.

The results show that starting steam injection as a secondary stage in heavy oil reservoirs can save time and gain more profits, especially at the high oil prices phase. Furthermore, the compensation for installing and operating a steam injection facility can pay for itself in a short period of time.

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2021-04-19
2024-03-29
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