Evaluation and Enhancement of Carbon Dioxide Flooding Through Sweep Improvement

DISCLAIMER This report was prepared as an account of work sponsored by an agency of the United States Government. Neither the United States Government nor any agency thereof, nor any of their employees, makes any warranty, express or implied, or assumes any legal liability or responsibility for the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of any information, apparatus, product, or process disclosed, or represents that its use would not infringe privately owned rights. Reference herein to any specific commercial product, process, or service by trade name, trademark, manufacturer, or otherwise does not necessarily constitute or imply its endorsement, recommendation, or favoring by the United States Government or any agency thereof. The views and opinions of authors expressed herein do not necessarily state or reflect those of the United States Government or any agency thereof. Carbon dioxide displacement is a common improved recovery method applied to light oil reservoirs (30-45 o API). The economic and technical success of CO 2 floods is often limited by poor sweep efficiency or large CO 2 utilization rates. Projected incremental recoveries for CO 2 floods range from 7% to 20% of the original oil in place; however, actual incremental recoveries range from 9% to 15% of the original oil in place, indicating the potential for significant additional recoveries with improved sweep efficiency. This research program was designed to study the effectiveness of carbon dioxide flooding in a mature reservoir to identify and develop methods and strategies to improve oil recovery in carbon dioxide floods. Specifically, the project has focused on relating laboratory, theoretical and simulation studies to actual field performance in a CO 2 flood in an attempt to understand and mitigate problems of areal and vertical sweep efficiency. In this work the focus has been on evaluating the status of existing swept regions of a mature CO 2 flood and developing procedures to improve the design of proposed floods. The Little Creek Field, Mississippi has been studied through laboratory, theoretical, numerical and simulation studies in an attempt to relate performance predictions to historical reservoir performance to determine sweep efficiency, improve the understanding of the reservoir response to CO 2 injection, and develop scaling methodologies to relate laboratory data and simulation results to predicted reservoir behavior. Existing laboratory information from Little Creek was analyzed and an extensive amount of field data was collected. This was merged with an understanding of previous work at Little Creek to generate …