Enhanced Cyclic Solvent Process and Its Fundamentals for Oil Sands and Heavy Oil Recovery

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Oil sands and heavy oil deposits in western Canada are significant and their development is beginning to play an important role in the Canadian energy economy. Many of these deposits are contained in reservoirs with less than 10 m pay zone and their in-situ recovery is challenging. Due to the high to extremely high viscosities of heavy oil and bitumen, improved recovery methods must be applied at the beginning or early stage of their production. In this proposed research a process for in-situ heavy oil and bitumen recovery in thin reservoirs - enhanced cyclic solvent process - will be developed and fundamentals of multiphase flow and mass transfer in porous media involved in the process will be studied. The fundamentals of the process include the dispersion of solvent into the oil, solution gas drive, foamy oil formation and flow, and interfacial phenomena of heavy oil-solvent (gas) systems. The new technology combines the major mechanisms of gas huff 'n' puff, solvent injection, and foamy oil flow of cold production into one process to overcome the drawbacks of the traditional cyclic gas injection process. The combined process effectively utilizes the viscosity reduction and foamy solution gas-drive mechanisms in the production cycles. The long term objective is to extend this process to field application by incorporating the developed fundamental theories and models into reservoir simulation. The models will be used to design field tests and predict performance for enhancing oil sands and heavy oil recovery. The proposed research is of greatest practical significance to oil sands and heavy oil development using gas and solvent methods. The results of this research are also applicable to other enhanced oil recovery processes including various thermal methods for heavy oil recovery and gas injection for enhanced conventional oil recovery. Many other engineering and science branches will also benefit from this research, such as soil and groundwater remediation in environmental engineering.