Experimental Evaluation of Heavy Oil Recovery by Hot Water Injection in a Middle Eastern Reservoir

Abstract

Abstract With the increase of oil demand worldwide and current oil price, the recovery of heavy oil deposits became a major issue in the oil industry. Overcoming the challenges and complexity associated with the production of these deposits has been the target and focus in recent years. Large quantity of hydrocarbon deposits remains unrecovered due to the high viscosity of oil. Thermal recovery processes are techniques used to reduce the oil viscosity and enhance the oil recovery by introducing heat to the underlying reservoirs. Hot water injection is a thermal recovery technique in which water is injected into hydrocarbon strata. The hot water injection reduces the viscosity of the heavy oil and provides a driving mechanism to sweep the heavy oil toward production wells. In this work, the application of hot water injection in a Middle Eastern reservoir with large heavy oil deposits was investigated. The reservoir's heavy oil had a viscosity of 500 cp and an initial oil saturation of 75%. Two-phase fluid flow displacement experiments were conducted. The objective was to find the optimum design parameters in terms of injection temperature and hot water slug size that would yield to the best performance. The results obtained from several design configurations are presented. These configurations include hot water floods with different slug sizes and sequences. These results can be used as a tool for the successful design of hot water injection to recover heavy oil in these types of reservoirs. In addition, they provide the condition under which a given design may yield better recovery performance.