Impact of production wells operational changes on high-viscosity oil recovery

Abstract

Abstract As light oil reserves are developed, the share of heavy high-viscosity oil (HVO) reserves, which are considered difficult to recover, increases in the total balance of oil reserves. Therefore, the future of the oil industry is inevitably linked to the development of highly viscous heavy oil deposits. Today, according to various estimates, epy reserves of high-viscosity oil and bitumen range from 790 billion tons to 1 trillion tons. This is more than 5 times more than the residual recoverable reserves of low and average viscosity oil. The world experience of developing high-viscosity oil deposits shows that the cost-effective development of most of them is limited due to low efficiency of oil wells and low oil recovery achieved through natural operation mode or flooding. If the first of these problems is successfully solved in recent times by drilling horizontal and multilateral wells, the second one requires the introduction of various technologies to influence the formation (thermal methods, miscible displacement, etc.), which are not always highly efficient. In this work we will consider the impact of changing the operation modes of production wells on the production of high-viscosity oil reserves on the example of the Northern Buzachi field (Republic of Kazakhstan).