Open Access

ARTICLE

Experimental study of interfacial phenomena between the heavy oil and maximum solvent concentration as function of injection pressures

by

1 Chemical Engineering Department, Abu Dhabi University, Abu Dhabi, UAE 2,3,4 Chemical Engineering Department, Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada .

Fluid Dynamics & Materials Processing 2016, 12(3), 111-123. https://doi.org/10.3970/fdmp.2016.012.111

Abstract

Heavy Oil is an up and coming energy resource that is aggressively being sought after as the world’s energy demand increases. As technology continues to improve, this once costly energy source is quickly becoming a more viable alternative. Vapor extraction (Vapex) process is an emerging technology for viscous oil recovery that has gained much attention in the oil industry. The vapor extraction of heavy oil system is presented to describe experimental setups and procedures used to perform different experiments of vape extraction process. The generated experimental data were used to calculate the live oil maximum interfacial solvent concentration as function of injection pressures. In this work the effect of solvent injection pressure pulsing on oil production rates and recovery was investigated. The lab-scale experiments were designed and carried out to investigate this concept. The experiments were performed injecting pure butane at injection pressures of 91.01, 97.90, 104.80, and 111.69 kPa and 21 ̊C for about 6 to 7 hours. A cylindrical physical model with 25 cm heights was packed with permeability 204 Darcy and saturated with heavy oil at high viscosity. The experiments were performed with different policies of solvent injection pressure versus time. Pressure pulsing was introduced by sudden release and re-injection of the solvent gas. Compared to constant injection pressure the pressure pulsing further enhanced the oil production rates and recoveries in Vapex process. 

---

Keywords

---