Volume 1: Energy Innovations: Accelerated Deployment, New Concepts, and Emerging Technologies

Characterization of Foamy Oil and Gas-Oil Flow for Heavy Oil/Propane System in Pressure Depletion Tests Xinqian Lu, Zeyu Lin, Xiang Zhou, Fanhua Zeng, Xiaolong Peng, Ziqi Qiu

Abstract

This work presents a non-equilibrium kinetic model to characterize foamy oil and gas/oil two-phase flow in heavy oil and propane system from pressure depletion tests. Good agreement between experiments data and simulation results are obtained in terms of production data as well as pressure distribution. The following parameters are tuned in the history match process, including k values, gas-liquid relative permeability curves, and reaction frequency factors. The simulation results suggest that bubbles pass through pore throat smoothly and have low dissolve rate in oil phase at low pressure drop rate, which results in high gas recovery factor and low oil recovery factor. Gas bubbles expand to a larger size and block the pore throat when increasing pressure drop rate to intermediate pressure depletion rate. At this range of pressure drop rate, foamy oil and gas/oil flow characterization is influenced by both gas bubbles evolve and dissolve process, which results in low gas recovery and high oil recovery. Continue to increase the pressure drop rate could cause gas bubbles to evolve faster than dissolve back and shorten production period, which results in a relatively low gas recovery as well as low oil recovery. The simulation work presented in this paper successfully characterized foamy oil behavior in the porous media for heavy oil/propane system. The innovative methodology presented in this work could be used as a general method to characterize foamy oil flow in heavy oil/propane system.

Keywords heavy oil, propane, two-phase flow, nonequilibrium kinetic model, foam oil