Modeling of the reservoirs heating with the aim of oil recovery increasing

Abstract

The object of the research is optimal installation of the heat injection wells for reservoirs heating in order to increase oil recovery and, accordingly, support oil production in the hard-reaching heterogeneous reservoirs. One of the most problematic areas in modern oil production is the difficulty of extracting high-viscosity oil from the reservoirs. So far, the most effective method to overcome this problem is the thermal method. However, the possibilities of this method are limited by its high energy consumption and the cost of relevant practice research. Thus, less expensive corresponding methods of mathematical modeling become more important. This investigation uses a combined finite-element-difference method for the non-stationary thermal conductivity problem. Numerical modeling of the temperature distribution around heat injection wells are carried out, taking into account the heterogeneity of the thermal properties of the oil reservoir and the conditions of convective heat exchange at the reservoir’s boundaries. The proposed method, due to its high accuracy and convergence of the solutions, allows to obtain reliable practical results and has a number of advantages in comparison with the same research methods. It is established that the process of heating of oil reservoirs is slow and energy consuming, so to increase profitability, it is obviously necessary to use associated production products, such as associated gas. It is shown that less wet layers heat up better and there is no sense to heat the layer for more than two weeks, because the radius of the effective heating area (with a temperature exceeding 80 °C required for outcome of high-viscosity oil from the rock) in this case is sufficient. It is also found that the operation of heat-injection wells is more profitable with their joint interaction, in that case the effective heating area of the oil reservoir and, accordingly, the number of production wells will be the largest. Another hand, the main factor in the location of heat-injection wells is defined by special characteristics of the oil-bearing section of the reservoir in each case. The configurations of the location of heat-injection wells, which were presented in this paper, cover the most optimal cases of the installations of considered oil-bearing section of the reservoirs and can be used in practice.