An Overview of Oil Production Stages: Enhanced Oil Recovery Techniques and Nitrogen Injection

Abstract

Abstract-During the life oil wells, production process usually passes three stages. Primary recovery uses the natural source of energy. Pumps and gas lifting are involved in the primary recovery. The main purpose of secondary recovery process is to maintain the reservoir pressure by either a natural gas flooding or water flooding.The rise in world oil prices has encouraged the producers to use the new technical developments. Enhanced oil recovery (EOR) is a collection of sophisticated methods, to extract the most oil from a reservoir. EOR can be divided into two major types of techniques: thermal and non-thermal recovery. Each technique has a specific use in a certain type of reservoirs.Among non-thermal techniques is the gas flooding, where gas is generally injected single or intermittently with water. Flue gas and nitrogen have only limited application as agents of a miscible displacement in deep and high pressure reservoirs.Although new development processes such as water alternating gas (WAG) or Simultaneous water alternating gas (SWAG), are implemented, there are still some problems encountered by EOR engineers. This paper is discussing the last updating in this field.Index Terms-Enhanced oil recovery (EOR), miscible flooding, nitrogen injection, water alternating gas (WAG).

Chemical-Enhanced Oil Recovery Using N,N-Dimethylcyclohexylamine on a Colombian Crude Oil

“…Afterwards, synthetic brine was injected with a continuous flow of 2 mL/min in a vertical ascending manner to ensure that water filled all pores until saturated. Pore volume (PV, cm 3 ), defined as the empty volume of the model, was calculated by measuring the volume of brine required to saturate the column [31].…”

“…Meanwhile, it is projected that 26% of the energy will be derived from petroleum until 2040 [2]. erefore, petroleum extraction is a practice that is increasing as well as its different processing stages [3]. When a reservoir is found, after the drilling process, production stage begins and primary recovery starts when crude oil rises to the surface naturally due to current reservoir pressure.…”

Methods for Enhancing Recovery of Heavy Crude Oil

“…The techniques remove the interface between the two interacting fluids, and this allows for total displacement efficiency [27]. The gasses used are carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) and natural gas or nitrogen, but CO 2 is commonly used for miscible displacement because it reduces the oil viscosity and cheaper [28]. Oil displacement by CO 2 injection depends on the mixtures of the gas and the crude phase behavior, which are strongly dependent on reservoir temperature, pressure and crude oil composition.…”

Effect of SiO2 on the foamability, thermal stability and interfacial tension of a novel nano-fluid hybrid surfactant

“…The advantage of EOR over the conventional technologies (primary and secondary) involves the injection of foreign fluids (surfactants, polymers, gases etc.) or energy capable of interfering with oil/water/rock systems to mobilize the oil to the surface (Alagorni et al, 2015). Approximately, 40 to 60 % of oil production rate has been attained with the utilization of the EOR technologies (Muggeridge et al, 2014).…”