Heavy Oil Displacement by Thermal Recovery Using Different Horizontal/Vertical Wells Configurations

Abstract

The use of horizontal wells in oil industry has increased rapidly during the last decade. The main reason for this upsurge is that wells provide large contact area with the reservoir and therefore enhance the well productivity or injectivity better than conventional vertical wells. The high productivity coupled with the recent advances in drilling technology for horizontal wells has made their application to be an economically viable option. The study will investigate by numerical simulation technique the performance of horizontal injection wells with production vertical wells in thermal recovery processes. A high resolution numerical simulator (ECLIPSE) will be used during the course of this research. Extensive three-dimensional, fine-mesh simulation runs will be performed to determine the oil recovery under different operating/reservoir conditions. The purpose will be to study the functional relationship between several design parameters and the oil recovery from horizontal/vertical wells configurations during thermal flooding. These parameters will include:configurations of horizontal and vertical wells,flood patterns,Horizontal well length,Mobility ratio. Introduction The use of horizontal wells in oil industry has increased rapidly during the last decades. The employment of horizontal wells instead of vertical wells is thought to improve the oil production, reduces gas and water coning problems, and increases the sweep efficiency. Therefore, the utilization of horizontal wells, instead of vertical ones, in enhanced oil recovery processes became attractive for the oil industry. Algharaib and Gharbi1 studied the advantages of Horizontal/Multilateral wells over the conventional vertical wells. They compared the performance of four Horizontal/Multilateral well configurations to that of the vertical wells in waterflooding operations. Their study shows that the pattern used has a significant effect on the displacement performance. Thermal Recovery is one of the common EOR recovery methods. Thermal recovery methods are used worldwide to recover heavy oil and bitumen. The basic process concept involved in thermal recovery processes is to generate hot fluid on the surface or in situ and inject it through an injection well into an oil bearing formation.