Hydrocarbon gas injection for improving oil recovery in tight and shale oil reservoirs
Creators: name: Sie, Chao-Yu
Publisher: name: The University of Texas at Austin
Year: 2021
Subjects: Miscible injection
Foam EOR
Huff-n-Puff
Natural gas

description: Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) in tight and shale oil reservoirs has been a difficult problem due to their high degree of heterogeneity and low to ultralow matrix permeability. Primary recovery factor from these reservoirs is generally lower than 10% of original oil in place (OOIP), which leads to the need for non-conventional technologies for EOR in these reservoirs. A thorough understanding of mass transfer processes in ultralow permeability porous media is required for successful designs of EOR projects in tight oil formations and shales. In this study, two advanced EOR methods that involve the reinjection of field gas into shale and tight oil reservoirs are investigated. In the first part of this dissertation, field gas huff-n-puff process as an EOR method for shales is systematically investigated using an optimal experimental design. For a better understanding of the mass transfer mechanisms in nano-sized pores, the effect of pressure program (i.e., pressure buildup and drawdown during a huff-n-puff cycle), reservoir and crude oil properties, solvent selection, and huff-n-puff cycle duration on oil recovery were investigated. The results show that thermodynamic phase behavior, molecular diffusion, and convection could be related to oil recovery factor, production rate, and produced oil composition, forming a conceptual model for natural gas huff-n-puff in shale reservoirs. The second part of this dissertation presents the investigation of a novel EOR method targeting water-sensitive tight formations with sub-10-mD permeability. Mobility control is crucial for high recovery efficiency in these tight oil reservoirs with high heterogeneity. Preferential flow in high permeability zones (or “thief zones”) results in poor sweep efficiency. Conventional conformance control techniques such as polymer gels or even aqueous foam may not be suitable for water-sensitive, low-permeability reservoirs. Therefore, a novel concept of non-aqueous foam for improving field gas miscible displacement has been developed. This foam process involves the injection of a raw mixture of natural gas liquids (MNGLs) with non-condensable gas and a foaming agent, which could improve the sweep efficiency by the generation of non-aqueous foam and maximize the displacement efficiency due to the solubility between the crude oil and MNGLs. A specialty surfactant has been developed which could stabilize non-aqueous foam in MNGLs-crude oil mixture for in-situ foam generation. A pore-scale study of this foam process has been conducted using microfluidics to relate oil displacement to foaming mechanisms. The findings from this microscopic study have been validated using core flooding experiments on tight rocks. It can be concluded from both pore- and core-scale studies that the in-situ propagation of non-aqueous foam could be achieved for the first time and delay the injectant breakthrough, resulting in significant improvement of sweep efficiency.