Compositional simulation of hydrocarbon recovery from oil shale reservoirs with diverse initial saturations of fluid phases by various thermal processes

• Main Authors: Kyung Jae Lee, George J Moridis, Christine A Ehlig-Economides
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: SAGE Publishing 2017-03-01
• Series: Energy Exploration & Exploitation
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1177/0144598716684307

We have studied the hydrocarbon production from oil shale reservoirs filled with diverse initial saturations of fluid phases by implementing numerical simulations of various thermal in-situ upgrading processes. We use our in-house fully functional, fully implicit, and non-isothermal simulator, which describes the in-situ upgrading processes and hydrocarbon recovery by multiphase-multicomponent systems. We have conducted two sets of simulation cases—five-spot well pattern problems and Shell In-situ Conversion Process (ICP) problems. In the five-spot well pattern problems, we have analyzed the effects of initial fluid phase that fills the single-phase reservoir and thermal processes by four cases—electrical heating in the single-phase-aqueous reservoir, electrical heating in the single-phase-gaseous reservoir, hot water injection in the single-phase-aqueous reservoir, and hot CO 2 injection in the single-phase-gaseous reservoir. In the ICP problems, we have analyzed the effects of initial saturations of fluid phases that fill two-phase-aqueous-and-gaseous reservoir by three cases—initial aqueous phase saturations of 0.16, 0.44, and 0.72. Through the simulation cases, system response and production behavior including temperature profile, kerogen fraction profile, evolution of effective porosity and absolute permeability, phase production, and product selectivity are analyzed. In the five-spot well pattern problems, it is found that the hot water injection in the aqueous phase reservoir shows the highest total hydrocarbon production, but also shows the highest water-oil-mass-ratio. Productions of phases and components show very different behavior in the cases of electrical heating in the aqueous phase reservoir and the gaseous phase reservoir. In the ICP problems, it is found that the speed of kerogen decomposition is almost identical in the cases, but the production behavior of phases and components is very different. It is found that more liquid organic phase has been produced in the case with the higher initial saturation of aqueous phase by the less production of gaseous phase.