Regular Article
Impacts of pore size distribution on gas injection in intraformational water zones in oil sands reservoirs
1
College of Petroleum Engineering, Xi'an Shiyou University, Xi'an, 710065 Shaanxi, China
2
Shaanxi Key Laboratory of Advanced Stimulation Technology for Oil & Gas Reservoirs, Xi'an, 710065 Shaanxi, China
3
Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering, University of Calgary, Calgary, T2N 1N4 Alberta, Canada
* Corresponding author: zhachen@ucalgary.ca
Received:
31
January
2020
Accepted:
8
June
2020
Intraformational water zones are widely reported in Canadian oil sands fields. In order to pressurize a thief zone, one of the initiatives is to inject gas. However, the evaluation of gas injectivity based on a pore size distribution is still a big challenge. This study provides a multi-scale approach to study the effect of a pore size distribution on gas injectivity in intraformational water zones. The results indicate the gas effective permeability increases in a less complex and more discrete pore network. The enhancement of gas effective permeability with increased gas saturation weakens with higher complexity and lower discreteness of a pore network. A less complex and more discrete pore network better benefits the gas injectivity index.
© J. Xu et al., published by IFP Energies nouvelles, 2020
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.