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Improved Hydrocarbon Recovery

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Petroleum Engineering

Abstract

The recovery of light and medium gravity oils by displacement with gas and water, and the recovery of relatively dry gases by expansion, can be considered conventional recovery processes. These techniques lead to gas recovery factors in the range 70–80% and oil recovery factors in the range 20–50%. Any improvement to gas recovery is very limited in terms of design of the recovery mechanism, and efficiency increase mainly involves acceleration of income through well location, well completion and compression choice. Oil recovery projects, on the other hand, appear to offer significant potential for further reducing residual oil saturation [1,2,3,4,6,7,8,11]. In practice, however, the distribution of residual oil in a reservoir is of particular significance; more so than the total oil volume. It can be argued that infili drilling is an effective improved recovery process [83] as is increasing produced water handling facilities. The term residual oil implies nothing absolute about oil saturation and it is process and reservoir property dependent.

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  1. Imperial College of Science and Technology, London, UK

    J. S. Archer & C. G. Wall

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© 1986 J S Archer and C G Wall

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Archer, J.S., Wall, C.G. (1986). Improved Hydrocarbon Recovery. In: Petroleum Engineering. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-9601-0_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-9601-0_12

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