Experimental study and calculations of the near critical behavior of a synthetic fluid in nitrogen injection

Abstract

In recent years, the use of nitrogen has increased as gas injection to recover oil fluids near the critical point. The behavior of hydrocarbon mixture phases in the critical region shows very interesting complex phenomena when facing a recovery project with nitrogen. Therefore, it is important to have experimental information of the PVTx thermodynamic variable, often scarce, for this type of critical phenomena. This paper reports the experimental measures of the volumetric behavior and phases of synthetic fluid in a nitrogen injection process. The experiment was performed at laboratory scale, and it obtained variations on the saturation pressure, gas oil ratio, density and composition of the hydrocarbon phase when nitrogen was injected at molars of 10, 20, 30 and 40% on different volumetric portions of the mother sample. In addition, the data obtained experimentally was used to demonstrate the capacity of tune to compositional models. The data provided represents a valuable contribution to the understanding of phenomena associated with retrograde and near critical regions, as well as their use in tuning and developing more elaborate models such as Cubic Equations of State (EOS). It is worth highlighting the importance of this data in the potential processes of nitrogen, CO2, and lean gas injection, which require knowledge of the gas-oil ratio, saturation pressures, density and composition of the fluid in current production. The identification of the phenomena shown, represent a potential application to the modeling of displacements and maintaining the pressure in the improved recovery when scaling up the laboratory data to the field / reservoir conditions.