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The Effect of Scale on the Primary Depletion of Heavy Oil Solution Gas Drive

Goodarzi, N.N. and Kantzas, A.

DOI: 10.2118/2006-087
CIM 2006-087 presented at the 57th Annual Technical Meeting of the Petroleum Society held in Calgary, June 13-15, 2006.

ABSTRACT

It has been well established that the primary production of heavy oil, exhibits higher that expected recovery due to the production of sand and the foamy oil mechanisms. In the literature, there has been much work done in the past to investigate the solution gas drive mechanisms that cause this behavior, in the absence of sand production. The aim of this work is to perform pressure depletion experiments on packings of different scales of length and diameters, ranging from 0.5 m to over 18 m in length and diameters of 0.02 m to 0.08 m. The experimental results combine the production, pressure and saturation data from three different scales with the same depletion rate. An attempt is made to compare and relate the results from the different scales.

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