Talal D Gamadi
Texas Tech University
USA
Title: Compositional reservoir simulation evaluation of the gas miscible injection in tight formation
Biography
Biography: Talal D Gamadi
Abstract
The Bakken is a very tight formation with the oil contained mostly in siltstone and sandstone reservoirs with low porosity and permeability. There could be an estimated 25 to 100 billion barrels of Bakken oil in place. At present, the combination of horizontal well drilling and the new multi-stage fracturing and completion technologies has been the solution to economically produce from the Bakken formation. The primary recovery factor however remains rather low due to high capillary trapping. While waterflooding could result in unfavorable infectivity issues, carbon dioxide (CO2) or natural miscible flooding provides a promising option for increasing the recovery factor. Higher oil recovery factor can be achieved with gas injection through multi-contact miscibility that results in vanishing interfacial tension, viscosity reduction and oil swelling. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the performance of the miscible gas flooding using compositional reservoir simulation approach. Different strategies were tested to compare the effects on oil recovery of injection well pattern and heterogeneity. The simulation results show that gas flooding presents a technically promising method for recovering the vast Bakken oil.