Insight investigation of miscible SCCO2 Water Alternating Gas (WAG) injection performance in heterogeneous sandstone reservoirs

Abstract

In this manuscript, we present the results of a systematic approach to investigate the impact of core scale heterogeneity on the efficiency of miscible CO2 water-alternating-gas (WAG) flooding performance. Both vertical (by layering two axially-cut half plugs with differing permeability) and horizontal (stacking two smaller core samples with differing permeability in series) heterogeneities are explored. In the layered or vertically heterogeneous sample, the permeability ratio (PR) defines the ratio between the permeability values of each half plug. Our special sample construction technique using either a thin impermeable Teflon sheet to prevent flow communication or a thin tissue to promote flow communication has enabled us to investigate the effect of crossflow between half plug on the performance of the WAG flood. For the stacked composite or the horizontally heterogeneous core samples, short cylindrical core segments were used each with a different permeability value. We have also investigated the effect of the EOR injection mode (i.e. secondary vs. tertiary) on our results. For this study, core flooding experiments were performed using n-C10, brine and CO2 at a temperature of 343 K and a pressure of 12.4 MPa. The results obtained for homogeneous, layered and composite samples indicate that CO2 WAG flood performs better in all cases and achieves the highest recovery factor (RF) when conducted under the secondary mode (e.g. homogeneous: 93.4%, layered: 74.0%, and composite: 90.9%) compared with the tertiary mode (e.g. homogeneous: 74.2%, layered: 64.1%, and composite: 71.3%). For the layered samples, it was found that the oil recovery decreases noticeably with an increase in the permeability ratio (PR). For instance, RFs of 93.4%, 90.1%, 78.8%, and 74.0% correspond to PRs of 1, 2.5, 5, and 12.5, respectively. In contrast to our previous findings with continuous CO2 flooding which showed that crossflow enhances recovery in layered samples, for this study using WAG, crossflow was found to negatively affect the RF. Such an outcome may be attributed to the conformance control achieved by WAG flooding which would be more pronounced in the case of non-communication layers (i.e. no cross flow). In other words, the higher oil recovery of WAG flooding in a non-communicating system may be due to the dominance of viscous forces and, to a lesser extent, the vanishing effect of gravity forces that tend to reduce sweep efficiency. The effect of composite heterogeneity on the RF was also investigated with the results showing that the permeability sequence along the length of a composite sample has a noticeable but more subtle impact on RF.