Evaluation of the Effect of Water Salinity, Water Viscosity, and Injection Strategy on Heavy Oil Recovery and Carbon Dioxide Storage in the Forest Reserve Field, Trinidad

Although Trinidad and Tobago has an abundant supply of relatively pure CO2 and more than 1 billion barrels of heavy oil deposits there are no active enhanced oil recovery (EOR) projects using carbon dioxide (CO2). In this paper, we have performed black oil simulation studies to evaluate several injection strategies with carbonated water, varying the salinity and viscosity of injected water. The salinity was varied by 1,000 and 35,000 ppm. The viscosity was increased by adding 0.1 weight percent polymer to injected water. The investigation was carried out using a commercial reservoir simulator. The simulation grid represents the properties of a quarter five-spot of the Lower Forest sand of the Forest Reserve Field. The reservoir simulation components used are water, polymer, H, Na, Cl-, dead oil, solution gas and CO2. The Stone #1 three-phase relative permeability model was used to calculate the three-phase relative permeabilities from two-phase data. In addition, a factorial experimental design was utilized and twelve simulation runs were done along with nine benchmark runs for comparison to other EOR methods. From the results obtained the following was concluded: water salinity has no effect on either oil recovery or carbon dioxide storage; polymer injection increases oil recovery and carbon dioxide storage. We found the optimal injection strategy to be a cycling of carbonated water alternating with polymer injection.