Viscosity modeling of solvent-water-heavy oil/bitumen systems at high pressures and elevated temperatures
type: CreativeWork
description: It is widely accepted that enhancing heavy oil/bitumen recovery has become a priority though fundamentally challenging due to the rising oil consumption and gradual depletion of conventional oil. The hybrid solvent-steam injection has been considered to be one of the most important enhanced oil recovery (EOR) methods for a given heavy oil/bitumen reservoir with its main mechanisms related to viscosity reduction resulted from thermal energy as well as solvent dissolution. To quantify the viscosity for such mixtures, various correlations have been proposed but each of them has its own limitations and may lead to large deviations under certain conditions. It is, therefore, important to accurately quantify the viscosity of solvent-water-heavy oil/bitumen systems within a unified, consistent, and efficient framework. First, this work presents a novel framework for dynamically reproducing the measured viscosity of solvent-heavy oil/bitumen systems under varying pressure and temperature conditions by integrating the Peng-Robinson equation of state (PR EOS) with binary interaction parameters (BIPs) and modified alpha functions. By treating heavy oil/bitumen as either as a single pseudocomponent (PC) or multiple PCs, the six most common mixing rules (i.e., Arrhenius’ mixing rule, Cragoe’s mixing rule, double-log mixing rule, Lobe’s mixing rule, power law mixing rule, and Shu’s mixing rule) have been evaluated and compared. By adopting the effective density concept, the volume-based power law, weight-based power law, and weight-based Cragoe’s mixing rules reproduce the experimentally measured viscosity from 4.3-15000.0 mPaꞏs within the pressure and temperature range from 1.1 to 10.9 MPa and from 287.9 to 463.4 K. When utilizing one PC to represent the oil sample, the overall absolute average relative deviation (AARD) for viscosity prediction is found to be 16.0%, 16.5%, and 29.4% for the aforementioned three mixing rules. When treating heavy oil/bitumen as four PCs, the AARDs…
abstract: It is widely accepted that enhancing heavy oil/bitumen recovery has become a priority though fundamentally challenging due to the rising oil consumption and gradual depletion of conventional oil. The hybrid solvent-steam injection has been considered to be one of the most important enhanced oil recovery (EOR) methods for a given heavy oil/bitumen reservoir with its main mechanisms related to viscosity reduction resulted from thermal energy as well as solvent dissolution. To quantify the viscosity for such mixtures, various correlations have been proposed but each of them has its own limitations and may lead to large deviations under certain conditions. It is, therefore, important to accurately quantify the viscosity of solvent-water-heavy oil/bitumen systems within a unified, consistent, and efficient framework. First, this work presents a novel framework for dynamically reproducing the measured viscosity of solvent-heavy oil/bitumen systems under varying pressure and temperature conditions by integrating the Peng-Robinson equation of state (PR EOS) with binary interaction parameters (BIPs) and modified alpha functions. By treating heavy oil/bitumen as either as a single pseudocomponent (PC) or multiple PCs, the six most common mixing rules (i.e., Arrhenius’ mixing rule, Cragoe’s mixing rule, double-log mixing rule, Lobe’s mixing rule, power law mixing rule, and Shu’s mixing rule) have been evaluated and compared. By adopting the effective density concept, the volume-based power law, weight-based power law, and weight-based Cragoe’s mixing rules reproduce the experimentally measured viscosity from 4.3-15000.0 mPaꞏs within the pressure and temperature range from 1.1 to 10.9 MPa and from 287.9 to 463.4 K. When utilizing one PC to represent the oil sample, the overall absolute average relative deviation (AARD) for viscosity prediction is found to be 16.0%, 16.5%, and 29.4% for the aforementioned three mixing rules. When treating heavy oil/bitumen as four PCs, the AARDs…
author: Hu, Bingge
language: en
date published: 2024-01
date modified: 2026-07-24T04:03:34Z
provider: University of Regina
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research, University of Regina

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: https://hdl.handle.net/10294/16432

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.82465/4244