Applicability of CO2-EOR in Shale-oil Reservoirs using Diagnostic Plots

Abstract

Unconventional resources have played a significant role in changing oil industry plans recently. Shale formations in North America such as Bakken, Niobrara, and Eagle Ford have huge oil in place, 100-900 Billion barrels of recoverable oil in Bakken only. However, the predicted primary recovery is still below 10%. Therefore, seeking for techniques to enhance oil recovery in these complex plays is inevitable. In this paper, two engineering-reversed approaches have been integrated to investigate the feasibility of CO2 huff-n-puff process in shale oil reservoirs. Firstly, a numerical simulation study was conducted to upscale the reported experimental-studies outcomes to the field conditions. As a result, different forward diagnostic plots have been generated from different combinations of CO2 physical mechanisms with different shale-reservoirs conditions. Secondly, different backward diagnostic plots have been produced from the history match with CO2 performances in fields' pilots which were performed in Bakken formation of North Dakota and Montana. Finally, fitting the backward with the forward diagnostic plots was used to report and diagnose some findings regarding the injected-CO2 performance in field scale. This study found that the porosity and permeability of natural fractures in shale reservoirs are significantly changed with production time, which in turn, led to a clear gap between CO2 performances in lab-conditions versus to what happened in field pilots. As a result, although experimental studies reported that CO2 molecular-diffusion mechanism has a significant impact on CO2 performance to extract oils from shale cores, pilot tests performances indicated a poor role for this mechanism in field conditions. Therefore, the bare upscaling process for the oil recovery improvement and the CO2-molecualr diffusion rate, which are obtained from CO2 injection in lab-cores, to the field scale via numerical simulations needs to be reconsidered. In addition, this study found that kinetics of oil recovery process in productive areas and CO2-diffusivity level are the keys to perform a successful CO2-EOR project. Furthermore, general guidelines have been produced from this work to perform successful CO2 projects in these complex plays. Finally, this paper provides a thorough idea about how CO2 performance is different in field scale of shale oil reservoirs as in lab-scale conditions.

Department(s)

Geosciences and Geological and Petroleum Engineering

Second Department

Chemical and Biochemical Engineering

International Standard Book Number (ISBN)

978-151084815-3

Document Type

Article - Conference proceedings

Document Version

Citation

File Type

text

Language(s)

English

Rights

© 2024 American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE), All rights reserved.

Publication Date

01 Jan 2017

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