Development of Scaling Crieteria for Waterflooding and Immiscible CO2 Flooding in Unconventional Reservoirs
type: CreativeWork
description: As conventional oil reserves are depleting, the rising energy demand as well as advancements in well drilling and stimulation technologies have attracted increasingly interests in exploiting the unconventional oil resources (e.g., tight oil and heavy oil). Tight oil resources in Canada are mainly located in Cardium and Viking pools in Alberta, Bakken formation in Saskatchewan, and Western Canada Shale plays, respectively. Also, tremendous heavy oil resources accounting for almost half of the total world heavy oil reserves are mainly found in Western Canada, though they are contained in thin and depleted reservoirs. Such unconventional oil resources either have been deposited in extremely unfavourable environments or possess high carbon intensity, requiring more efforts and energy to recover than conventional oils. In practice, three-dimensional (3D) displacement models show unique advantages for designing appropriate well configurations, though their physical constraints make it impossible to duplicate the real reservoirs under certain conditions. Therefore, it is of fundamental and practical importance to develop scaling criteria for describing fluid flow behaviour in unconventional reservoirs. Scaling criteria have been developed and validated to evaluate the performance of both waterflooding and immiscible CO2 flooding in tight formations. Experimentally, saturation pressures of the CO2-light oil systems are determined with a versatile PVT system and then used to tune the binary interaction parameter (BIP) correlations between CO2 and the lumped pseudo-components. Subsequently, waterflooding and immiscible CO2 flooding have been respectively conducted with light oil in the 3D physical model. Theoretically, mathematical formulae have been derived to reveal fluid flow of immiscible displacements in tight oil reservoir by performing dimensional and inspectional analyses. Since not all of the scaling groups can be satisfied, relaxation of the scaling groups will be m…
abstract: As conventional oil reserves are depleting, the rising energy demand as well as advancements in well drilling and stimulation technologies have attracted increasingly interests in exploiting the unconventional oil resources (e.g., tight oil and heavy oil). Tight oil resources in Canada are mainly located in Cardium and Viking pools in Alberta, Bakken formation in Saskatchewan, and Western Canada Shale plays, respectively. Also, tremendous heavy oil resources accounting for almost half of the total world heavy oil reserves are mainly found in Western Canada, though they are contained in thin and depleted reservoirs. Such unconventional oil resources either have been deposited in extremely unfavourable environments or possess high carbon intensity, requiring more efforts and energy to recover than conventional oils. In practice, three-dimensional (3D) displacement models show unique advantages for designing appropriate well configurations, though their physical constraints make it impossible to duplicate the real reservoirs under certain conditions. Therefore, it is of fundamental and practical importance to develop scaling criteria for describing fluid flow behaviour in unconventional reservoirs. Scaling criteria have been developed and validated to evaluate the performance of both waterflooding and immiscible CO2 flooding in tight formations. Experimentally, saturation pressures of the CO2-light oil systems are determined with a versatile PVT system and then used to tune the binary interaction parameter (BIP) correlations between CO2 and the lumped pseudo-components. Subsequently, waterflooding and immiscible CO2 flooding have been respectively conducted with light oil in the 3D physical model. Theoretically, mathematical formulae have been derived to reveal fluid flow of immiscible displacements in tight oil reservoir by performing dimensional and inspectional analyses. Since not all of the scaling groups can be satisfied, relaxation of the scaling groups will be m…
author: Zhou, Deyue
language: en
date published: 2015-02
date modified: 2026-07-24T04:03:41Z
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/10294/5860

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.82465/4576