Volume 63

An Experimental Study on the Feasibility of Chemical Ignition for Heavy Oil Reservoir Haitao Ren, Renbao Zhao, Jiyang Liu, Guanghui Zhou

Abstract

Experiment investigation on the feasibility of chemical ignition method used in achieving a successful ISC process is conducted in this work, which the electrical heating method might not be a good selection due to the deep heavy oil reservoir. A longer wire connecting with the heating rod is needed and a greater electrical resistance would be generated combining with more heat release. Therefore, an accelerated thermal aging issues for the wire should be concerned. What is more, the water flooding and other enhanced oil recovery methods have been applied in this deep heavy oil reservoirs developing with edge and bottom water of Tuha oil field, and a poor performance is obtained. Hence, chemical ignition method is proposed and the composition of ignition materials are evaluated through the kinetic cell and the combustion tube experiments. The results indicate that the chemical ignition agent with a high-temperature oxidation reaction varying in the range of 120-170℃ is prone to a successful combustion tube. When the ambient temperature with an initial value of 120℃ is given, a successful ignition can be achieved with a slowly temperature rising rate, especially in its early stage. However, the temperature rise rate would be presented with a significant greater combining with an intense high temperature oxidation (HTO) process as the increasing air injection rate is performed with a higher ignition temperature value of 170 ℃. Then a successful ignition combining with a better oil recovery is obtained. Finally, the chemical ignition process was successfully verified to achieve stable expansion of the combustion chamber in three-dimensional large-scale model experiments. The results and recognition of this work can be a valuable reference for the application of chemical ignition in the development of medium to deep heavy oil reservoir..

Keywords Middle-Deep Heavy, In-situ Combustion, Ignition with Chemical Method, Kinetic cell