ENHANCED OIL RECOVERY AND 1

ITS TYPES
Abdullah babar

2012-pet-56
 ENHANCED OIL RECOVERY
AND ITS TYPES
 CONTENTS
1) What is EOR?
2) Why EOR is needed and its target?
3) Principles of EOR
4) EOR, reserves and investment
5) Types of EOR
I. Chemical EOR methods
II. Thermal injection methods
6) References

ENHANCED OIL RECOVERY AND 4

ITS TYPES
 WHAT IS EOR?
• Generally, the term “EOR” relates to any
action taken to increase the recovery of oil

• More sophisticated operation than the

injection of water or gas into the reservoir

ENHANCED OIL RECOVERY AND 5

ITS TYPES
6
SECONDARY RECOVERY AND EOR

• General Confusion between these terms

• Water and gas flooding was termed as
“Secondary Recovery”
• Later, further efforts on those wells were
termed as “Tertiary recovery”
• In general, they were finally termed as
“Enhanced Oil Recovery”

ENHANCED OIL RECOVERY AND 7

ITS TYPES
 WHY EOR ?
• Primary and secondary recovery reach their
economic limits
• It is believed that they have produced 20% to
40% of oil discovered
• Individual Reservoir recovery can range from
5% to 80%
• This is due to properties of rocks and fluids
and kind of energy that drives the oil

ENHANCED OIL RECOVERY AND 8

ITS TYPES
 CONTINUED…
• Survey done in 10 US regions and showed
that about two-third of the OOIP still
remained
• 23% of that oil could be recovered by CO2
flood technologies
• 89 billion barrels of more oil could be
recovered
• That means, it can supply US for more than a
decade at present consumption rates !!!
ENHANCED OIL RECOVERY AND 9
ITS TYPES
10
 EOR TARGET
• First and major target; to maximize the
production

• But how it does that ??

• It targets that residual oil saturation

ENHANCED OIL RECOVERY AND 11

ITS TYPES
 EOR TARGET
• Oil and water are immiscible

• Due to viscous forces and interfacial tension,

oil gets trapped in the pores

• This phenomenon is called “snap off”

• That is the residual oil saturation

ENHANCED OIL RECOVERY AND 12

ITS TYPES
13
 PRINCIPLES OF EOR
• Three basic principles of EOR

1)Improve sweep efficiency

2)Reduce the capillary and interfacial forces
and hence increase the mobility of oil
3)First two points working simultaneously

ENHANCED OIL RECOVERY AND 14

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EOR, RESERVES AND INVESTMENT

• Reserves are recoverable petroleum from

known reservoirs under prevailing technology

• Following material balance equation defines

them:

ENHANCED OIL RECOVERY AND 15

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EOR, RESERVES AND INVESTMENT

• Reserves change with time

• Interested in keeping them constant or

increasing them

• Addition to reserves should be focused on

ENHANCED OIL RECOVERY AND 16

ITS TYPES
EOR, RESERVES AND INVESTMENT

• ADDING TO RESERVES:

1)Discovering new reservoirs

2)Extending reservoirs in known fields
3)Redefining reserves because of change of
extraction technology

ENHANCED OIL RECOVERY AND 17

ITS TYPES
EOR, RESERVES AND INVESTMENT

• First two steps require drilling operations

• Need for finding large reservoirs as 2% yearly
increase in world oil consumption rates
• Problem; drilling requires substantial capital
investment
• Investing in EOR is cheap(if previous wells
are used)

ENHANCED OIL RECOVERY AND 18

ITS TYPES
 EOR AND INCREMENTAL OIL

• How much would the EOR project produce

the incremental oil?

• Success of EOR project depend upon

amount of incremental oil produced

ENHANCED OIL RECOVERY AND 19

ITS TYPES
ENHANCED OIL RECOVERY AND 20
ITS TYPES
 1) CHEMICAL EOR PROCESS
• Further classified as:

a)Mobility Control Processes

b)Low IFT Processes

ENHANCED OIL RECOVERY AND 21

ITS TYPES
a) MOBILITY CONTROL PROCESS
• Ratio of permeability to viscosity is called
mobility

• This includes the process in which low

mobility fluid is injected to maximize the
vertical and displacement sweep efficiency

ENHANCED OIL RECOVERY AND 22

ITS TYPES
a) MOBILITY CONTROL PROCESS

• Two major mobility control processes are:

i. Polymer flooding

ii. Foam flooding

ENHANCED OIL RECOVERY AND 23

ITS TYPES
 i. POLYMER FLOODING
• Some amount of polymer added to thicken
the brine

• This results is reduction in water’s mobility

• Polyacrylamide and XC-biopolymer is added

to the water

ENHANCED OIL RECOVERY AND 24

ITS TYPES
 Polymer
solution

water Oil bank

ENHANCED OIL RECOVERY AND 25

ITS TYPES
 WHEN IT IS NEEDED?
• Generally done after the process of water
flooding

• Half of the original oil is still left after water

flooding

• Volumetric coverage efficiency improved by

thickening of the injected fluid

ENHANCED OIL RECOVERY AND 26

ITS TYPES
 ii. FOAM FLOODING
• Foam flooding is used as an alternate for
polymer flooding
• Foams are dispersions of relatively large
volume of gas bubbles in small volume of
liquid
• Foams are useful as they have relatively high
resistance to flow in porous medium

ENHANCED OIL RECOVERY AND 27

ITS TYPES
 WHEN IT IS NEEDED
• Following could be the applications:

1)To block the flow of injected fluids into the

high permeability areas
2)To improve the mobility ratio by decreasing
the mobility of injected phase

ENHANCED OIL RECOVERY AND 28

ITS TYPES
 b) LOW IFT PROCESS
• These process rely on injecting or forming in-
situ surfactant which lowers the IFT of oil and
water
• This results in helping to produce residual oil
• Alkaline solutions are sent into the reservoir
as they react with acidic components of the
crude oil and form surfactant

ENHANCED OIL RECOVERY AND 29

ITS TYPES
 b) LOW IFT PROCESS
• Two major low IFT processes are:

i) Surfactant flooding

ii) Alkaline flooding

ENHANCED OIL RECOVERY AND 30

ITS TYPES
 i) SURFACTANT FLOODING
• Surfactants are amphiphillic molecules i.e.
they are hydrophobic and hydropholic in
nature

• Process in which we add small amount of

surfactant to lower the IFT that helps to
sweep the reservoir

ENHANCED OIL RECOVERY AND 31

ITS TYPES
 FUNCTIONS OF SURFACTANT
• Some of its functions are:
1)It adsorbs at an interface, lowering the
interfacial tension between fluids or between
a fluid and a solid
2)This results in changing of the wettability of
the rock

ENHANCED OIL RECOVERY AND 32

ITS TYPES
 i) ALKALINE FLOODING
• This is mostly done along with the water
flooding

• Alkalis such as sodium hydroxide and

sodium carbonates are injected that react
with certain types of oils to produce
surfactant inside the reservoir

ENHANCED OIL RECOVERY AND 33

ITS TYPES
2) THERMAL INJECTION METHODS

• Most widely used EOR technique

• Energy, created on surface or subsurface, is
injected into the reservoir
• Energy carrier can be water or gas
• Major purpose to reduce the viscosity of the
heavy oils

ENHANCED OIL RECOVERY AND 34

ITS TYPES
 CONTINUED…
• Two-third of the total EOR production in US is
based on thermal methods
• Fields with billions of barrels of heavy oil is
present in the world
• Some produce 2%-5% of OOIP by
conventional methods
• That made the studies in thermal injection to
go more deep

ENHANCED OIL RECOVERY AND 35

ITS TYPES
 SCREENING CRITERIA
• Thermal methods are used mostly on
reservoirs with following properties:
API gravity of 10o to 25o
Viscosity of 10-10,000cp
Temperature 60oF-280oF
Depths for steam flooding around 3500ft

ENHANCED OIL RECOVERY AND 36

ITS TYPES
 TYPES OF THERMAL METHODS

• Major types of thermal methods are:

a) Hot water floods
b) Steam flooding
c) In-situ combustion

ENHANCED OIL RECOVERY AND 37

ITS TYPES
 a) HOT WATER FLOODS
• In many cases, hot water was injected to
dissolve asphalt and waxes

• It performs two major jobs

i) Viscosity reduction
ii) Thermal expansion

ENHANCED OIL RECOVERY AND 38

ITS TYPES
 EFFECTS OF HWF
• Viscosity reduction increases the fractional
flow of oil at that saturation
• Thermal expansion causes the fluid to have
more energy and get produced
• Change in IFT between reservoir fluids is
also observed

ENHANCED OIL RECOVERY AND 39

ITS TYPES
 b) STEAM FLOODING
• Some way similar to the HWF

• Till yet, steam flooding is the most effective

EOR method

• Steam, better energy carrier than the hot

water

ENHANCED OIL RECOVERY AND 40

ITS TYPES
LIMITATION OF STEAM FLOODING

• Only 5% - 10% of the steam generated at the

surface reaches the reservoir

• This limits its application to around 3500ft

ENHANCED OIL RECOVERY AND 41

ITS TYPES
 HOW SF IS PERFORMED?
• Huff and puff method used
• Steam injected for around 5 days and left to
soak for approximately 2-3 days
• Production rate dramatically increases but
lowers within 8 months
• Could be repeated for 3-4 times

ENHANCED OIL RECOVERY AND 42

ITS TYPES
 c) IN SITU COMBUSTION
• Burning of the oil in place(in-situ) is
performed to get the production

• Together with steam drive, this combination

is very useful

• Also termed as “fire-flooding”

ENHANCED OIL RECOVERY AND 43

ITS TYPES
 HOW IT IS PERFORMED?
• Heater or ignitor is lowered into the injection
well
• Air is continuously injected into the well
• Heater is taken back after heating the
surrounding rocks
• Continuous injecting of air maintains the
combustion front
• Water is sometimes injected along with air to
form the steam which assists
ENHANCED OIL RECOVERY AND 44
ITS TYPES
 LIMITATION OF THIS METHOD
• Steam and combustion vapors tends to go
upward, reducing the efficiency of this
method
• This problem is called overriding effect
• Injection of water along with the air can
reduce the effect, making it more dense

ENHANCED OIL RECOVERY AND 45

ITS TYPES
 REFERENCES
• Enhanced oil recovery by Teknica
• Fundamentals of EOR, by Russel Johns
• EOR information, NIPER
• http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/284416/in-situ-combusti
on
• surfactant: Schlumberger Oilfield Glossary
• Surfactant - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• Fundamentals of EOR, Larry W.Lake
• Mwangi thesis
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_oil_recovery

ENHANCED OIL RECOVERY AND 46

ITS TYPES
THANK YOU !

ENHANCED OIL RECOVERY AND 47

ITS TYPES