A Modeling Study of EOR Potential for CO2 Huff-n-Puff in Tight Oil Reservoirs - Example from the Bakken Formation
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The most commonly used technology for development of unconventional liquid-rich and light oil reservoirs is horizontal wells combined with large multi-stage hydraulic fracture treatments. However, even with these technological advancements, primary recovery factors are generally less than 10% (Shoaib and Hoffman, 2009) of the original oil in place (OOIP). Logically, operators have investigated the use of waterflooding to improve recovery in some tight oil reservoirs, but the success has been mixed. Low matrix permeability in some unconventional (tight) oil reservoirs will not allow effective displacement or movement of water through the reservoir. In some cases, even flooding with a gas will be a challenge, if matrix permeabilities are too low. This study investigates the feasibility of enhanced oil recovery (EOR) in a prominent tight oil reservoir in North America using cyclic solvent injection (CSI, sometimes referred to as "huff-n-puff") with carbon dioxide (CO2) as the solvent. CSI is a single well process, with the solvent remaining in the vicinity of the wellbore, as flow of the solvent through the reservoir to another well is not necessary. This type of process may be attractive from a capital cost point-of-view, as large expenditures on specialized facilities, in-field pipelines and well conversions are unnecessary. In this study, the success and profitability of huff-n-puff is evaluated for the Bakken tight oil reservoir. Knowledge gained from a parallel study (Kanfar and Clarkson, 2017) served to provide guidelines for optimizing the huff-n-puff process. Importantly, a genetic algorithm (GA) is utilized to find the optimum huff-n-puff program that maximizes net present value (NPV). Optimized parameters include: the number of cycles; duration of injection, soaking and production periods; and the start time of huff-n-puff operations. The target reservoir for evaluation is the US Bakken deep tight oil reservoir in North Dakota. The huff-n-puff EOR scheme was found to be successful, but only after the aforementioned operational parameters are optimized with GA. In particular, it is important to delay huff-n-puff until production rates decline and boundary-dominated flow (after fracture interference) is reached. Importantly, as with the parallel study (Kanfar and Clarkson 2017), the gridding scheme used in the simulation is found to have a profound impact on results of huff-n-puff.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
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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 it