In situ formed carboxylic acids effect on light hydrocarbons oxidation in a carbonate reservoir

Abstract

© 2020 IOP Publishing Ltd. All rights reserved. Enhancing heavy oil recovery is attracting a considerable interest due to the depletion of conventional oil resources. In fact, thermal enhanced oil recovery methods are presenting a potential impact on improving heavy oil recovery especially for terrigenous reservoirs, where they are able to increase oil mobility due to heating (steam and thermal exposure) or due to its in-situ conversion to light fractions during ignition of the reservoir. At the same time, it is worthy to note that steam-thermal methods are accompanied by a significant heat loss when injecting steam into great depths heat. Moreover, oil deposits in heterogeneous low-permeability reservoirs (for example, carbonate) are among the potential unconventional oil resources. Along with geological heterogeneity, low porosity and permeability, fracturing, these reservoirs contain, in most cases, heavy oils with a high content of resins, asphaltenes and hard paraffins, characterized by a non-Newtonian fluid property. All this taken together makes the extraction of oil from such reservoirs a hard task to implement.