Enhanced Oil Recovery

The subject is enhanced oil recovery (EOR) used to improve recovery beyone that expected by pressure depletion. Water injection, hydrocarbon (HC) gas injection, and combined water/gas injection (WAG) are the most common EOR methods used in the industry today. Other EOR methods (typically more expensive and technically more complicated) covered are non-hydrocarbon (CO2 and N2) injection, compositional effects e.g vaporization, and developed miscibility, both in conventional reseervoirs and natrually fractured reservoirs. The course will primarily consider reservoir aspects of EOR methods using HC gas and water injection. Key parameters include microscopic (pore-level) recovery, areal and vertical sweep efficiency. Variations in reservoir rock - i.e. heterogeneities - and fluid property variations with depth can have a strong influence on the success of EOR methods. Therefore we will concentrate on accurate geologic and fluid description and its influence on recovery.

Knowledge: The students should understand the application of rate flow equations, reservoir simulation, and production models to describe reservoir-to-sales flow system for gas, gas condensate, and oil fields.

Skills: The students should understand how to use the EOS-based PVT program PhazeComp and SENSOR reservoir simulator to estimate oil and gas properties for reservoir and production engineering applications of gas and oil fields, including depletion and gas- and water-based IOR (miscible and immiscible).

General knowledge: The student should learn to solve real-life problems without solutions being handed out (only provided through in-class partial solutions by the teacher) - i.e. relying on their own ability to check and cross-check their work with others, in addition to using the lectures to ask questions about their solutions to problems. Critical self-learning is emphasized. Self-study is also required to decide what supportive reading is needed to understand (1) lectured material, (2) problems, and (3) project - these three defining the course curriculum.

The course will be given as a seminar with self-study curriculum when fewer than 5 students apply to take the course. Students planning to take the course must give a written request to the teacher for taking the course prior to the semester start. Excercises and project will involve the application of geologic and numerical models to describe oil and gas condensate fields. Simulations of different depletion and EOR methods will be used to compare alternative development strategies, with optimization of technical issues and study the sensitivity of results to parameters with key uncertainties.