Numerical Modeling on CO2-EOR and its Storage Potential: a Case Study of Iranian Off-Shore Oil Field

Due to the many environmental issues caused by countless usage of carbon fuels, public efforts are trying to find sustainable solutions for the problems we are facing nowadays. One of the practical solutions examined during the last decades is CO2-EOR technology, which can be simultaneously implemented as a storage project for the anthropogenic CO2 gas.

This study investigates implementing CO2-EOR technology in an off-shore oil field located in Iran by using numerical simulation. ECLIPSE simulator is used for the modeling purpose to investigate the factors affecting the CO2-EOR process in order to identify the optimum conditions to recover the maximum amount of oil in actual conditions and determine the injectivity constrain in the reservoir.

The factors of vertical and horizontal permeability, fluid viscosity, saturation endpoints as well as temperature and pressure of injection, the combination of CO2-N2, and the combination of CO2-C1 are examined in this study in detail.

According to the results, the permeability, fluid gravity, the temperature and pressure of injection, as well as the type of flooding fluid have the most influential parameters on production respectively. However, the number and location of injection wells also affect the dynamic simulation results.