A Study of Water and Carbonated Water Injection with Constant Pressure Boundaries

Yang, Huan (2014) A Study of Water and Carbonated Water Injection with Constant Pressure Boundaries. Masters thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

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Abstract

The Buckley-Leverett theory for one-dimensional constant fluid velocity is widely used in the oil and gas industry. However, given a changing fluid velocity with fixed pressure boundary conditions, limitations arise. This work is based on an existing extension of the Buckley-Leverett theory in a water-oil system with fixed pressure boundary conditions. This allows the Buckley-Leverett theory to be applied to situations of injecting water at a constant bottom-hole pressure and producing oil at a fixed bottom-hole pressure. Based on mass conservation, numerical simulation is performed in Matlab® using the Implicit Pressure Explicit Satuation (IMPES) method for two-phase flow. The numerical solution is compared to the recently developed analytical solution for different case studies. The comparison is also used to illustrate the effect of numerical dispersion and round-off errors. This extension of the Buckley-Leverett theory has significant consequences in its applicability to more realistic operating scenarios and computational savings through analytical solutions. Carbonated water injection is studied numerically based on the validated water injection model. In carbonated water injection, CO₂ is dissolved in water phase before injection. After injection, the properties of reservoir fluids will change due to the partitioning of CO₂ between both the water and oil phases. Therefore, the reduction of oil viscosity and oil-water interfacial tension would be the main factors affecting the oil recovery. However, there is minimal research on carbonated water flooding combining both thermodynamics and reservoir simulation models. This research aims to study the effect for oil recovery in carbonated water injection based on both physical and numerical perspectives.

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