The Role of Connate Water Saturation in VAPEX Process
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The objective of this work was to study the effect of connate water in the progression of the Vapor Extraction (VAPEX) process for heavy oil recovery. A large fraction of the physical model tests of the VAPEX process reported in the literature have been conducted without any connate water in the system. The absence of connate water was rationalized by suggesting that it has little or no influence on relative permeability of oil and since the vaporized solvent does not dissolve in water, there is no effect of water on the mass transfer process. We have evaluated the effect of connate water on VAPEX performance using physical model experiments carried out in a visual model, with different connate water saturations. Butane was used as the solvent and fine Ottawa sand was used for packing the model to obtain permeability and capillary pressure values comparable to the field conditions. In addition to the visual observations of the size and shape of the vapor chamber, the rates of oil and gas production were monitored during the experiments. The results show that connate water has a measurable effect on the process, both in terms of the shape of the vapor chamber and the drainage rate of the diluted oil. The presence of connate water causes faster spreading of the vapor chamber in the lateral direction and tends to increase the thickness of the mixing zone. This increase in the mixing zone thickness appears to result from capillarity driven fingering phenomenon. The mixing zone had a distinct uneven appearance that was similar to patterns generated by frontal instabilities in miscible displacements. The effect of connate water on drainage rate was an increase in the initial rate but a reduction in the rate subsequently. The presence of mobile water speeds up the communication between the two wells and leads to even faster spreading of the vapor chamber. Introduction Vapour Extraction process is a non-thermal energy efficient heavy oil emerging technology which requires lower capital costs and lowers environmental pollution. A simple comparison of this solvent based process with conventional thermal processes shows advantages of this new method of heavy and extra heavy oil production. Solvent based non-thermal heavy oil recovery methods are relatively new and need to be further developed. No field results have been reported from any of the pilot test projects that are currently in process. Although several successful SAGD and CSS field projects have been reported, the high cost of steam generation, considerable energy loss, need for water and water treatment(1) are the problems which necessitate finding a more effective and environmentally friendly recovery method. Meanwhile, Solvent based processes have drawn more attention due to their potential advantages. One of the more attractive solvent based processes is the vapour extraction (VAPEX) process. In this process, vaporized light hydrocarbons, like propane and butane or a mixture of these two with carrier gases, are used. VAPEX is a solvent analogue of the SAGD process and uses essentially the same well configuration (1).
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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) | 0.003 | 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".