An evaluation of enhanced oil recovery strategies for a heavy oil reservoir after cold production with sand

Cold heavy oil production with sand (CHOPS) is the process of choice for unconsolidated heavy oil reservoirs with relatively high gas content. The key challenge of CHOPS is that the recovery factor tends to be between 5% and 15%, implying that the majority of the oil remains in the ground after the process is rendered uneconomic. Continued cold production (without sands) is not productive for a post-CHOPS reservoir because of the low oil saturation and depleted reservoir pressure in the wormhole regions. There is a need to develop viable recovery processes for post-CHOPS reservoirs. Here, different follow-up processes are examined for a post-CHOPS heavy oil reservoir. In post-CHOPS cold water flooding, severe water channeling is ineffective at displacing high viscosity heavy oil. Hot water flooding improves the sweep efficiency and produces more oil compared with cold water flooding. However, the swept region is limited to the domain between the neighboring wormhole networks, and the energy efficiency of the process is relatively poor. Compared with the hot water flooding case, steam flooding achieves higher oil production rates and lower water use. A cyclic steam stimulation strategy achieves the best performance regarding oil production rates and water usage. Based on our results, it is observed that thermally based techniques alone are not capable to recover the oil economically for post-CHOPS reservoirs. However, it is suggested that techniques with combined use of thermal energy and solvent could potentially yield efficient oil recovery methods for these reservoirs. Copyright (c) 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.