Production Technology - Possibility of Cycling Deep Depleted Oil Reservoirs After Compression to a Single Phase

The compressing of gas into a partially depleted gas drive oil reservoir to bring the contents to a single phase miscible with gas is proposed as a process worthy of serious study. The compressed gas and vaporized oil would be recovered by cycling. This paper explores the Possibility of recovering oil from reservoirs of 6,000 ft or more by this method. INTRODUCTION Many new methods for increasing the recovery of oil from reservoirs are under consideration in the various research laboratories. One method which should be considered for recovering oil From partially depleted gas drive fields is to compress gas into the reservoir until the contents become a single phase miscible with more gas. Natural gas then may be cycled through the reservoir to recover the oil. This procedure ideally will eliminate the capillary effects of the liquid ill the porous media and should permit recoveries similar to those obtained in cycling operations, probably of the order of 80 per cent. This paper explores the information now available for the prediction of the performance of such a project and discusses the problems likely to be encountered in recovering oil by cycling. For many years dry natural gas has been passed through oil reservoirs to recover natural gasoline which would vaporize from the oil. Recently a process of recovering more of the high boiling hydrocarbons has been described by employing high pressures at which the heavier hydrocarbons have a higher volatility. Nevertheless. this reported method does not eliminate the differential nature of the vaporization process and capillary forces are still present in the reservoir. The process under discussion in this paper would minimize differential vaporization and would remove capillary forces which are responsible for low oil recoveries. Higher gas pressures are required to accomplish this removal of the miniscus, but it does not follow that more gas is required for oil recovery. The process is limited to reservoirs deep enough to permit the use of the required pressure — Probabably 6,000 it and deeper. DESCRIPTION OF THE PROCESS Briefly, the process is to compress natural gas into an oil reservoir which is partially depleted so that it has an oil saturation in the range of 40 to 60 per cent of the hydrocarbon pore space. The injected gas will pass through the channels formerly carrying gas to the wells to build up the pressure and dissolve in the oil phase. This injection will continue without production from the field until the reservoir reaches a single phase. If one were to select unique conditions such that the gas composition, the reservoir oil composition and the Per cent saturation would bring the mixture in the reservoir to the critical temperature and pressure simultaneously the phase behavior accompanying injection is shown by Fig. 1. The oil-gas mixture in the depleted reservoir has a critical temperature at C,. Addition of natural gas to the mixture will give a new critical temperature for each addition. Mixture No. 3 is shown to have its critical temperature at the reservoir temperature and reservoir pressure at P: the critical pressure. Under ideal behavior, the entire reservoir would be at iti critical temperature and pressure and the entire hydrocarbon content would be at a single phase. If the reservoir content were a binary system of methane and a heavy constituent. it would be miscible with more methane. However, for complex mixtures the critical locus does not confine the two phase region, and the dew point curves of Fig. 1 occur above the critical locus. If fluid which was injected into the rezervoir at the critical point were of the