Autonomous Inflow Control Valve for Heavy and Extra-Heavy Oil

Abstract

Abstract One of the challenges in heavy and extra heavy oil production are the relatively low recovery rate. A major challenge is to improve recovery from existing fields by developing and implementing new technologies that make mature and marginal fields more profitable. One of the challenges in heavy oil field with water drive or gas cap is the mobility ratio. Due to the high viscosity water and/or gas breakthrough will occur after short time production. This means that after a period of production, all wells will have water and/or gas breakthrough. As the breakthrough expands the production have to be limited due to excessive gas and/or water production. This means that production from the well have to be choked or stopped, even there is oil left along the wellbore. Inflow Control Device (ICD) and Autonomous Inflow Control Device (AICD) has shown that the oil production and recovery can be increased significantly with better inflow control along the well. However, neither ICD nor AICD is able to shut off the unwanted gas and water production completely. The newly developed and patented Autonomous Inflow Control Valve (AICV®) can shut off the unwanted fluid completely. This is the next generation autonomous inflow control. The technology can be installed in both new horizontal wells and recompleted into old wells with high water productions. The new completion technology is presented and experimental test results with gas, oil and water are presented together with reservoir simulations that confirm that the AICV® will give significantly increased recovery in field suffering from gas or water breakthrough.