The in-situ combustion ISC) process is an enhanced oil recovery EOR) method that utilizes fuel in place to upgrade and displace the hydrocarbons in heavy oil reservoirs. In ISC processes, air is injected into a heated section of the reservoir. Upon reaching a threshold temperature, oxygen from the injected air reacts with the oil in …
Tag Archive: Petroleum
Mar
11
Mar
09
Measurement and Modeling of Emulsion Layer Growth in Continuous Oil-Water Separations
Water-in-crude oil emulsions present considerable challenges to the petroleum industry both during upstream production and downstream treatment of crude oil, especially in the case of oil sands separation processes, where these emulsions contribute to the formation of rag layers. A rag layer is the material that accumulates and persists at the oil/water interface and it …
Mar
06
Phase Behaviour Prediction for Ill-Defined Hydrocarbon Mixtures
Phase behaviour information is essential for the development and optimization of hydrocarbon resource production, transport and refining technologies. Experimental data sets for mixtures containing heavy oil and bitumen are sparse as phase behaviour data are difficult to obtain and cost remains prohibitive for most applications. A computational tool that predicts phase behaviours reliably for mixtures …
Mar
04
Modeling of horizontal well performance in bottom-water reservoirs with flow barrier
Billions of barrels of light and heavy oil reserves remain trapped in the bottom-water reservoirs. A major problem for developing these reservoirs is that water coning during oil production results in decrease of oil production and increase of water production. In this thesis study, a new method is developed to improve oil production and reduce …
Mar
02
The effects of gravity and thermal gradient on the drying processes in porous media
This dissertation focuses on analyzing the compound effects of capillarity and gravity driven viscous flow through macroscopic liquid films during both isothermal and non-isothermal drying processes of porous materials. A mathematical model is developed to describe the drying process in a pore-network representation of porous media. The problem is characterized by a series of dimensionless …
Feb
25
Mechanism of Dynamic Buckling of A Rod in Tubing
The phenomenon of buckling of a rod-in-tubing is of great importance in petroleum engineering. The typical buckling process of a rod-in-tubing consists of three stages； the lateral buckling stage, the transition stage from the lateral buckling to the helical buckling and the helical buckling stage. Although many papers have been published on the lateral and …
Feb
23
Advanced Compositional Simulation of Carbon Dioxide Processes
Compositional simulators have become essential modelling tools for CO2 processes in the Petroleum Industry. Their evolution has enabled the models to represent an ever increasing number of physical and chemical phenomena applied to discretized grid meshes that approach the cell-size used in geological modelling. The advances in computational power encourage the development of meaningful improvements …
Feb
21
Estimation of Fracture Properties for a Horizontal Well with Multiple Hydraulic Fractures in Gas Shale
This research work presents a new method for estimating fracture properties for a horizontal well with multiple hydraulic fractures in shale gas reservoirs. This method utilizes the production data obtained during the linear flow period to provide reliable estimates of both fracture half-length and formation permeability. The new method provides an excellent alternative to the …
Feb
21
Reservoir formation damage due to scaling deposition
Water flooding as a means of enhanced oil and gas recovery has been in the petroleum industry for decades. The injection of brine into the reservoir for enhanced recovery often leads to formation damage by scale deposition. This is often caused by injection brine and formation brine incompatibilities. For proper planning and optimization of field …
Feb
17
Optimization Strategies Proposed for Improving Well Performance and Pressure Transient Analysis in Bottom Water Reservoirs
In the upstream petroleum sector, water coning is an undesirable phenomenon that has posed serious challenges to reservoir engineers. Several studies have been carried out to investigate diverse approaches that can mitigate the water-coning problem in order to maximize oil recovery and lower the operating cost that is associated with the problem of handling a …