Ethane-Based EOR: An Innovative and Profitable EOR Opportunity for a Low Price Environment

Abstract

This paper summarizes the current state of the ethane industry in the United States and explores the opportunity for using ethane for enhanced oil recovery. We show both simulation data and field examples to demonstrate that ethane is an excellent EOR injectant.After decades of research and field application, the use of CO 2 as an EOR injectant has proven to be very successful. However, there are limited supplies of low cost CO 2 available, and there are also significant drawbacks, especially corrosion, involving its use. The rich gasses and volatile oils developed by horizontal drilling and fracturing in the shale reservoirs have brought about an enormous increase in ethane production. Ethane prices have dropped substantially. In the U.S., ethane is no longer priced as a petrochemical feedstock, but is priced as fuel. Also, substantial quantities of ethane are currently being flared.Ethane-based EOR can supplement the very successful CO 2 -based EOR industry in the U.S. There simply isn't enough low-cost CO 2 available to undertake all of the potential gas EOR projects in the U.S. The current abundance of low-cost ethane presents a significant opportunity to add new gas EOR projects. The ethane-based EOR opportunity can be summarized as follows;1. CO 2 -based EOR works well, and is well understood. 2. Ethane is better than CO 2 for EOR. 3. Ethane is simpler than CO 2 for EOR. 4. Ethane is now inexpensive, and will likely stay inexpensive. 5. Ethane-based EOR has become a viable option in the Lower 48. Large volumes of low-cost ethane are available. Recent additions to the growing ethane infrastructure now deliver ethane to locations where ethane-based EOR targets are plentiful.

Viscosity reduction of extra heavy crude oil by magnetite nanoparticle-based ferrofluids

“…In searching for economically viable options to locate these crude oils in viscosity conditions required for its production and subsequent transport, and thus meet the production volumes projected by the market, different methods to reduce the viscosity of this kind of crudes have been used. These methods include practices at subsurface conditions such as thermal processes in enhanced oil recovery (EOR) and ''cold'' processes including injection of solvents and light crudes (Islam et al, 1992;McGuire et al, 2016;Picha, 2007), in situ deasphalting (Jamaluddin et al, 1996;Mokrys and Butler, 1993), and nanoparticle-based treatments (Taborda et al, 2016;Zabala et al, 2016). At surface conditions other techniques have been proposed like heating (Davletbaev et al, 2014), dilution (Alomair and Almusallam, 2013; Garcı´a Zapata and De Klerk, 2014), oil in water emulsions (Alfonso and Drubey, 2008;Md.…”

An Enhanced-Solvent Deasphalting Process: Effect of Inclusion of SiO2Nanoparticles in the Quality of Deasphalted Oil

“…However, in these processes, the crude oil returns to its original viscosity when the temperature of the crude oil decreases [60,61]. Other nonthermal techniques for viscosity reduction have been used in reservoirs including injection of diluents (naphtha and light crude oils) [62][63][64] and CO 2 injection in enhanced oil recovery (EOR) processes [65][66][67], among others. Nevertheless, these techniques could initiate the destabilization of the asphaltenes, which in some cases leads to formation damage due to their precipitation/deposition in the pore throats, reducing porosity and permeability and affecting reservoir wettability [17,[67][68][69].…”

A comparative study of huff-n-puff gas and solvent injection in a shale gas condensate core

“…Their work demonstrated the superiority of ethane in viscosity reduction and achieved miscibility. Ethane is recently gaining attention as an EOR injection gas for shale reservoirs because of its low cost (McGuire et al, 2016). These low costs and high volumes of ethane availability are attributed to horizontal well and hydraulic fracturing development of shale reservoirs that revolutionized production from the oil and gas industry.…”