The flow and heat transfer characteristics of compressed air in high-pressure air injection wells

High-pressure air injection (HPAI) is a significant enhanced oil recovery (EOR) technology of light oils especially in deep, thin, low-permeability reservoirs. The flow and heat transfer behaviors of compressed air in wellbore is essential to maximize performance of air in EOR. Due to strong compressibility of air and high injection pressure, wellbore temperature and pressure are greatly affected by friction and gas compression. However, the available models of wellbore flow and heat transfer are only accurate for thermal fluid, such as saturated steam and superheated steam, injected at relatively low pressure and high temperature. In this paper, a novel model is proposed to characterize wellbore pressure and temperature distribution for HPAI wells with consideration of dynamic behaviors of injected air. Flow and heat transfer in depth direction are coupled with air properties by iterative technique, and heat transfer in radial direction is treated as steady state in wellbore and transient state in formation. The mathematical model is solved by employing finite difference method and it is validated by field data. Then, integrated analyses of flowing pressure, heat transfer mechanism, and interaction between pressure and temperature are conducted. Results indicate that (1) as well depth increases, temperature difference between formation and air tends to become constant, and the radial heat transfer tends to reach an equilibrium state. The higher the flow rate is, the deeper the equilibrium depth is. (2) Air temperature is dominated by heat transmission from formation at low flow rates and dominated by frictional heat and gas compression effect at high flow rates. Fictional heat begins to affect air temperature at an injection rate beyond the critical value, while gas compression effect can increase air temperature in the whole calculated injection rate range. (3) Interaction between wellbore temperature and pressure is mainly achieved by altering air density. The effect of injection pressure on air temperature can be negligible, while the influence of injection temperature shows strong dependency on injection rate.