Development of a Generalized Experimental Methodology for Investigating the Role of Steam Quality on Steamflooding Performance

Abstract

Summary For steamflooding processes, steam quality plays a crucial role because it affects enhanced oil recovery mechanisms and production performance. Many numerical simulations have been performed on the role of steam quality. However, few studies have evaluated the role of steam quality on steamflooding performance by experimental measurements because of the lack of a generalized experimental methodology to accurately generate and measure steam with different qualities under reservoir conditions. The objective of this study is to propose a generalized experimental methodology for investigating the role of steam quality on steamflooding performance. A steam quality controlling box was newly designed and fabricated to generate steam with different qualities, and its reliability was verified by a novel steam quality measurement system together with a developed theoretical method. Then, a series of experiments were conducted by our designed 1D and 2D sandpack models to evaluate the steamflooding performance under different steam qualities. The results showed that the developed methodology could accurately generate and measure steam with different steam qualities. The maximum errors between desired, measured, and calculated steam qualities were 4.39% under the experimental conditions in this study. The steam quality substantially affected the steamflooding performance. A higher steam quality led to a lower water cut, a lower maximum pressure difference between the inlet and outlet of the sandpack model, a lower water/oil ratio (WOR), a lower steam/oil ratio (SOR), a higher oil recovery, and a higher oil production rate. However, there is an optimal value of steam quality from the view of heat efficiency in this study. The oil recoveries of 2D steamflooding experiments increased from 36.30 to 45.02% when the steam quality increased from 0 to 0.8. However, the optimal steam quality of 0.6 had the maximum heat efficiency at 3.16×10−5 kJ−1. This research contributes to a better understanding of steam quality on steamflooding performance and also provides a generalized methodology for other steam injection processes.