Efficient Displacement of Heavy Oil using Three Hydrocarbon Phases
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Mixtures of oil with solvent gas can exhibit three-hydrocarbon-phase behavior at reservoir conditions, where the solvent-rich liquid (L2) phase coexists with the gaseous (V) and oleic (L1) phases. Three-hydrocarbon-phase behavior has been studied in the literature for CO2 floods and enriched gas floods at relatively low temperatures. Prior research on heavy-oil displacement with enriched gas presented that displacement efficiency at a given throughput can be non-monotonic with respect to gas enrichment. Slim-tube experiments for such displacements showed that oil recovery increased first, then decreased, and increased again with increasing gas enrichment. An optimum displacement with a high efficiency of more than 90% was observed when three-hydrocarbon-phase flow was present. However, detailed mechanisms for such an optimum displacement with three phases have not been explained in the literature. In this research, we investigate mass transfer on multiphase transitions between two and three phases for three-hydrocarbon-phase displacements. Simple conditions are derived for the multiphase transitions that yield high local displacement efficiency by three hydrocarbon phases. The derivation is based on the generalized jump conditions for a multiphase transition shock from analytical theory of one-dimensional gas injection. The conditions derived are applied to explain non-monotonic oil recovery in quaternary displacements and the West Sak oil displacements. Oil recovery at a given throughput can be non-monotonic with respect to pressure or gas enrichment. Such a non-monotonic trend can occur when local oil displacement by three hydrocarbon phases becomes more efficient, but slower, with decreasing pressure or decreasing gas enrichment. An optimum pressure or enrichment can occur as a consequence of the balance between the local displacement efficiency and the propagation rate of three hydrocarbon phases. The West Sak oil displacement with enriched gas studied in this research yields a high displacement efficiency of more than 90% at 1.5 hydrocarbon-pore-volumes injected at 53% methane dilution.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".