Effects of Temperature on Foamy Oil Flowin Solution Gas-Drive in Cold Lake Field
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The roles of foamy oil flow in cold production of heavy oils under solution gas-drive have been extensively studied in recent years. However, the mechanisms of foamy oil flow in porous media are still not fully understood. The viscosities of heavy oils and bitumen are often so high that the solution gas drive should yield very little oil production. However, several heavy oil reservoirs in Canada and Venezuela have displayed very high solution gas drive recovery factors and foamy oil flow is believed to be the cause. The recovery factor projected for steam stimulation operation in Cold Lake is also very high, up to 30﹪ of OOIP. Since the primary drive energy in Cold Lake comes from solution gas drive, it has been suggested that foamy oil flow may be responsible for this high recovery factor. The objective of this work was to examine the effects of temperature on foamy oil flow in a clean sand with Cold Lake oil and methane gas. Solution gas drive experiments were carried out in a sand-pack at several different temperatures and depletion rates. The results show that, in isothermal depletion tests, the highest recovery factor does not occur at the highest temperature used. Instead, a much lower optimum temperature exists which provides the highest recovery. The reasons for this appear to be the diminished gas solubility and reduced foamy behaviour at higher temperatures, which counteract the positive influence of reduced viscosity. Introduction It has been found that oil continuous foam is produced during primary, production of heavy oil in several heavy oil reservoirs. Essentially the foam is formed by release of solution gas in the continuous oil phase. These foamy oils, because of their veryomplex structure, exhibit complicated and unusual flow behaviour. he formation of dispersed gas bubbles in the heavy oil has been suggested to be an important factor contributing to the success in primary production of several heavy oil reservoirs(1-4). The foamy nature of the oil keeps the released solution gas dispersed in the oil, which is very different from the conventional oil behaviour. Several investigators have reported the results of pressure depletion experiments. These results indicate that the beneficial effects of foamy oil diminish as the rate of pressure change becomes small. However, most previous work on foamy oil flow has been aimed at cold production, so that the temperature factor is not considered. Although some useful insights into the foamy oil flow mechanisms were developed, foamy oil flow in conjunction with thermal recovery methods has not been adequately studied. The presence or absence of foamy oil behaviour depends on the rheological and surface properties of the oil. While the oil viscosity can be measured directly, it is difficult to characterize the relevant surface properties of the system. The foam stability may be a useful measure of the surface properties of the oil-gas system in relation to the foamy oil behaviour. Sheng(5) reported that foam stability decreases with the reduction of oil viscosity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| 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) | 0.002 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".