Non-Isothermal Enhanced Recovery of Heavy Oils by Numerical Simulation

摘要

The world has been witnessing a growing interest in heavy oil fields as a result of a reduction in conventional oil reserves. In this sense, this work aims to study numerically the process of heavy oil recovering in oil reservoir via water injection. Transient three-dimensional numerical simulations, considering isothermal and non-isothermal processes, were performed using the ANSYS CFX 11 commercial code, and its effects upon the oil recovery factor evaluated. The numerical results indicated an increase of 29% (non-isothermal case) and 18% (isothermal case) in the recovery factor when water was injected on the reservoir surface as compared to the water internal injection in the reservoir.