ENCH 629 Secondary and Tertiary Recovery 1-1
UNIVERSITY OF BASRAH
COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING
PETROLEUM DEPARTMENT
SOR
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Primary, Secondary and Tertiary Recovery
Primary Recovery – Recovery obtained with displacement energy
naturally present in the reservoir, i.e. without any supplemental energy
injected from surface.
- Solution gas drive
- Water drive
- Gas cap drive
- Gravity drainage
- Fluid expansion
- Rock compaction
Secondary Recovery – Additional oil recovery obtained by injection of
water or an immiscible gas; usually implemented after primary
production has reached its economic limit.
- Waterflooding
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- Gas flooding
- Pressure maintenance
EOR or Tertiary Recovery – Recovery of more oil than what would be
recovered by secondary recovery techniques by using more advanced
methods.
- Mobility control
- Chemicals flooding
- Miscible gas flooding
- Thermal methods
The names primary, secondary and tertiary recoveries are a reflection
of the sequence in which these methods were traditionally applied.
There is nothing sacred about this sequence, though it may still be the
most logical in many reservoirs.
Either of primary or secondary methods or both may be skipped before
applying the tertiary methods, e.g. Thermal methods in heavy oil
reservoirs.
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We will call all EOR techniques tertiary methods even when they are
applied without going through primary or secondary techniques.
Targets for EOR Processes
The objective of tertiary techniques is to recover the oil that would be
left behind after the secondary techniques have run their course, i.e. the
target for tertiary processes is the residual oil saturation in the reservoir
after secondary recovery.
This target is bigger than the known
proved reserves.
In US the residual oil is roughly twice as
much as the sum of past production and
remaining reserves.
In Canada the EOR target is even a larger
fraction of the OOIP, due to
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preponderance of heavy oil and bitumen deposits.
Worldwide the picture is similar to that in US.
Why are the combined primary and secondary
recovery factors so low?
Consider primary and waterflooding.
The actual range of primary recovery factors is very wide but the
average would be around 15% OF OOIP.
Waterflooding recovery factors are comparable to the primary, so an
additional 15% of OOIP is recovered by water flooding.
This leaves 70% of OOIP unrecovered.
There are two reasons for the large amount of oil being left behind after
waterflooding:
1. Residual oil saturation in the swept zone.
2. Poor volumetric sweep
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Let us examine a typical case.
Original oil saturation = 70%
Oil saturation at end of primary = 60%
For water flooding:
Soi = 0.60
Sor = 0.35
0.6 0.35
Microscopic displacement efficiency, ED = 0.42
0.60
Volumetric sweep, EV = 0.60
Overall waterflood displacement efficiency ED.EV = 0.42*0.6 = 0.25
Average oil saturation after waterflooding = 0.6*(1-0.25) = 0.45
0.7 0.45
Combined primary and waterflooding recovery factor = 0.36
0.7
The objective of EOR is to recover some of this remaining oil. This
requires increasing the displacement efficiency and/or the sweep
efficiency.
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How can EV be improved?
Let us first look at the reasons for poor volumetric sweep efficiency.
There are several reasons:
Reservoir heterogeneities – vertical variation of permeability and
other heterogeneities
Gravity segregation
Flow instabilities – viscous fingering
Heterogeneities cannot be removed but one can design displacements
to reduce their impact.
Effect of gravity segregation can be overcome by running floods in a
gravity stable direction, where possible.
Viscous fingering is caused by adverse mobility ratio. It is possible to
change the mobility ratio by either decreasing the mobility of
displacing fluid or increasing the mobility of displaced oil. Water-
soluble polymers reduce water mobility; thermal methods increase oil
mobility.
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How ED can be improved?
Residual oil in waterflooding is left behind in the form of small
isolated oil droplets or larger ganglia.
Such oil remains trapped due to the capillary forces, which must be
overcome to push the oil ganglia through small pore throats.
Capillary forces are proportional to the interfacial tension between
the oil and the displacing fluid.
The trapped oil can be mobilized by reducing the interfacial tension.
ED can, therefore, be improved by changing the balance between the
capillary trapping forces and mobilizing viscous forces.
This is done primarily by reducing the interfacial tension between
the oil and the displacing fluid.
Target is to reduce the IFT to zero or near zero values.
Miscible fluids – zero IFT
Surfactant solutions – low IFT
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Why we cannot recover all of the remaining oil by EOR?
Theoretically miscible flooding can achieve 100% displacement
efficiency, since zero IFT means zero capillary trapping forces.
In practice, economic considerations come in the way and EOR
can recover only a small fraction of the waterflood residual oil.
Oil is one of the cheapest chemicals, fetching only about 15
cents/l.
Displacing miscible fluids can be expensive. Then you have to add
the cost of drilling wells and running the flood.
Unless you can recover a lot of oil with a small volume of injected
chemical, the process becomes uneconomical.
EOR processes must achieve very high displacement efficiency to
stay profitable.
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EOR Processes
There are five broad categories:
1. Mobility control processes.
2. Chemical flooding
3. Miscible flooding
4. Thermal methods
5. Other emerging technologies
In this course we will examine only the first three.
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Mobility Control: These processes work by altering the mobility ratio.
Most successful is the polymer flooding process. Other methods include
foams, gels, gelled foams, water alternating gas injection and emulsion
flooding.
Mobility control is an essential part of other methods as well but some
times it becomes the main mechanism.
Polymer flooding involves addition of a small concentration of
soluble polymer to injected water. Typical concentration is 500
ppm, i.e. 0.5 kg of polymer dissolved in 1 m3 of water.
This is relatively inexpensive EOR fluid.
The cost of polymer is typically $10.00/kg, so polymer solution costs
about $5.00/m3.
It is still 10 to 20 times more expensive than water.
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Here we see that waterflooding is
giving poor sweep due to viscous
fingering
Polymer injection improves the
sweep.
Only a small slug of polymer is
injected to keep the cost low,
typically about 50% PV.
Often the concentration of polymer
is decreased gradually to reduce the
fingering of water into the slug.
The additional recovery with
polymer flooding is very modest,
typically less than 5% OOIP.
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Chemical Flooding
These processes rely on very low IFT between the injected fluid and
the oil.
The injected fluid can be a simple surfactant solution or a more
complex miceller solution containing a cocktail of surfactants, co-
surfactants, electrolytes, oil and water.
Such miceller solutions can be as expensive as the oil they displace.
Only a small slug can be used in such processes.
The difficult part is to propagate the slug through the reservoir without
loosing its ultra-low IFT.
There are several mechanisms that work against such propagation.
1. Uneven advance due to reservoir heterogeneities.
2. Dilution with resident water and chase water
3. Adsorption of chemicals on rock surfaces
4. Chromatographic separation of the mixture.
5. Uneven salinity in the reservoir
6. Breakdown of the chemicals by bacteria and other mechanisms.
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Miscible Flooding Processes
These involve injection of a fluid that is miscible with the oil.
Miscibility means no interface between the oil and the displacing fluid.
Absence of interfaces means absence of capillary forces.
There are two types of miscible displacements:
1. FCM – first contact miscible
2. MCM – multiple contact miscible
In FCM processes the injected fluid is miscible with the oil at the
reservoir conditions as soon as it comes in contact with the oil.
In MCM processes the injected fluid is not totally miscible with the oil
when it first contacts the oil.
Multiple contact miscibility develops as a result of change in the
composition of the injected fluid or the oil due to multiple contacts
between the oil and the injected fluids.
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MCM processes
There are two types:
1. Vaporizing gas drive
2. Condensing gas drive
In vaporizing drive, miscibility develops due to evaporation of
intermediate hydrocarbons from the oil into the injected gas stream.
The injected gas becomes richer in intermediate hydrocarbons as it
travels through the formation and eventually becomes miscible with
the oil.
In condensing gas drive the injected gas is rich in low and intermediate
hydrocarbons but the resident oil lacks such compounds.
The oil absorbs low and intermediate hydrocarbons from the gas and
gradually becomes richer in such compounds.
When the oil has absorbed enough of such hydrocarbons, it becomes
miscible with the incoming gas.
Note that in condensing gas drive the miscibility develops at the
injection point after some volume of gas has passed through while in
vaporizing drive it develops downstream in the reservoir.
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Mobility Control in Miscible Flooding
Injected miscible gases are much lower in viscosity than the
displaced oil.
The density of the injected gas is also much lower than that of the
oil.
Therefore viscous fingering and gravity segregation become major
concerns in miscible gas flooding.
The volumetric sweep is often very low in miscible processes and
corrective measures are necessary.
These include mobility control methods and using gravity stable
designs where possible.
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