Experiment and simulation on heavy oil production with steam flooding in heterogeneous reservoir

Heavy oil has long been known as one of the main energy sources due to the huge amount of reserves. Heavy oil production depends on reservoir characteristics like permeability, reservoir pressure as well as oil viscosity. The difficulty to produce this oil is its high viscosity. The practical technology to produce this heavy oil is to use steam as steam-flooding method to reduce oil viscosity. However, the huge energy consumption in steam-flooding operation can impact the operating cost as well as a project life. Therefore, the objectives of this study are to measure the viscosity and correlate the results with temperature and to simulate the oil production by using STARS, a CMG program. Moreover, the effects of parameters like well distance, injection rate and permeability on the oil production are also investigated. The simulation results show that oil viscosity and permeability play significant roles in heavy oil production. Also, the higher oil recovery can be obtained by increasing the steam injection rate and shorten the well spacing. These conditions can be applied to use in the real field for heavy oil production. The major benefit of this practice is to reduce the steam consumption and fuel costs and increase more oil production thus extending the economic project life.