Enhanced Oil Recovery: Fundamentals and Applications (RES31)

Description

This course builds an understanding of why EOR is important and discusses the various EOR mechanisms in detail.

Course Level: Skill
Duration: 5 days
Instructor: Todd Hoffman

Designed for you, if you are...

A petroleum engineer who needs knowledge of fundamental and practical aspects of enhanced oil recovery
To get the most out of the class you should have a prior understanding of basic reservoir engineering principles.

How we build your confidence

We will employ various screening criteria to determine which EOR process is right for your reservoir
We will define important parameters for all techniques and estimate recoveries for the different EOR techniques using simplified analytical methods
Field examples are used throughout the course to enhance understanding of the course material

The benefits from attending

By the end of the course you will feel confident in your understanding of when and where it is appropriate to use EOR techniques from each of the three main processes thermal, miscible, and chemical.

These techniques include CO2 and hydrocarbon miscible gas injections practices, chemical technologies of polymer, surfactant and alkali-surfactant floods, and thermal methods of steam injection and in situ combustion, along with other commercial and near-commercial technologies.

For each technique, participants will learn how to:

Calculate injection requirements for a reservoir
Estimate the reservoir response and recovery
Design wells, surface installations and monitoring systems

Topics

Fundamental processes
- EOR: What, why and how?
- Screening criteria
- Viscous, capillary and gravity forces
- Pore scale trapping / displacement
- Mobilisation of trapped oil
- Phase mobility
- Geologic factors in EOR
- Areal and vertical sweep efficiencies
- Displacement efficiencies
- Fractional flow theory and linear displacement
- Buckley Leverett and Welge solutions

Thermal recovery
- Introduction to thermal EOR
- Heat transfer in reservoirs
- Steam generation and properties
- Heat losses in flow lines and in wellbores
- Reservoir heating / Marx and Langenheim
- Stream drive / Myhill and Stegemeier
- Cyclic steam / Boberg and Lantz / Contigo and Aziz
- SAGD / Bulter
- In situ combustion / Nelson and McNiel

Miscible / gas injection processes
- Minimum miscibility determination
- First contact miscible vs multi-contact miscible
- Optimising WAG ratios
- Hydrocarbon: LPG, enriched gas and lean gas
- VAPEX / Heavy Oils
- CO2 properties and required volumes
- Estimating recovery
- Well and facility requirements
- Corrosion protection

Chemical floods
- Common chemicals and properties
- Thermal stability
- Adsorption / chemical loss
- Slug size requirement
- Polymer / water viscosity
- Surfactant / reducing IFT
- Alkali and ASP floods
- Microbial

Customer Feedback

"The topics and content were beyond my expectations. Especially thermal part was very satisfying." - Engineer at TPAO

"The course reaches very well all the aspects regarding the EOR technologies, theoretically and examples" - Research Scientist at OMV Petrom