Carbon Dioxide Huff and Puff as Environmentally Friendly Method for Enhanced Heavy Oil Recovery

Abstract

Abstract Heavy oil and bitumen are making up approximately 70 percent of the remaining estimated hydrocarbon reserves. Many Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) methods such as chemical flooding, thermal recovery, gas injection, etc., were developed to make advances in the production of unconventional oil. Among all the variety of EOR methods, thermal recovery produces practically all of the heavy oil and bitumen among the various EOR methods. But at the same time, throughout its application, there are several disadvantages were revealed such as it is an expensive and not environmentally friendly process, heat loss in surface facilities and distribution lines, the efficiency is low after injection, increases in the extracted oil’s surface viscosity have caused polymerization reactions of free radicals created during the steam injection process, and the requirement for continuous steam injection is attempting to keep a hot oil-water interface at the front of the flow. For these reasons, the solvent-based non-thermal recovery method can be used to enhance heavy oil and bitumen recovery in unconventional reservoirs (thin or deep reservoirs) to prevent or reduce unwanted effects as described above. Toluene, carbon dioxide (CO2), ethane, propane, normal butane, and mixture solvents, among others, can be used as the injection solvent for the solvent-based non-thermal recovery method. That is why the researchers have concentrated on carbon dioxide as a solvent with Huff & Puff method to develop the production of heavy oil and bitumen to overcome all these negative issues because CO2 has several characteristics that make it an excellent option for this application. In this paper, the CO2 Huff and Puff method is reviewed. The CO2 Huff and Puff method’s viscosity reduction and oil swelling procedures have been the most significant factors in increasing heavy oil production. As a results, impacts of oil swelling at various temperatures and pressures as well as the viscosity reduction ratio with CO2 injection have been studied.