Air Injection—Improved Determination of theReaction Scheme With Ramped TemperatureExperiment and Numerical Simulation

摘要

In Situ Combustion is a possible method for producingheavy oil when other methods such as SAGD are notadequate (e.g. in thin beds, or when CO2 emission forsteam generation is unacceptable…). Previous field trialsof this process have often been unsuccessful. However, inrecent years, several new well implementations have beenproposed (COSH, THAI, …), exploiting the moreadvanced drilling capabilities available nowadays.Simulations of such configurations require a reliablerepresentation at field scale of the oxy-combustionreactions, which is not available at the present time.The objective of the work described in this paper is toillustrate some improvements in the description of oxycombustionreactions both at the experimental level andin the simulation models. A “ramped temperature”experiment has been conducted on an extra heavy stock tank oil (10000 cp at reservoir conditions). Thisexperiment has been successfully matched using acommercial simulator. The improvement over classicaladiabatic reactor experiments is significant: twocombustion reactions are clearly observed, and theArrhenius parameters are determined with increasedaccuracy. The reliability of the inferred parameter valuesis checked by applying them to simulations of previousadiabatic disk reactor experiments conducted under avariety of conditions.The final part of the paper is dedicated to illustratingthe impact of the new reaction scheme on the simulationresults at field scale.