Steam Conformance along Horizontal Well with Different Well Configurations of Single Tubing: An Experimental and Numerical Investigation

Dual-pipe steam injection technique has currently demonstrated technical potential for improving heavy oil recovery. It can effectively delay the occurrence of steam fingering and homogenize the steam injection profile along the horizontal wellbore. In this paper, first, we built a cylindrical wellbore physical model to experimentally study the steam injection profiles of a single-pipe horizontal well and a concentric dual-pipe horizontal well. Thus, the heat and mass transfer behavior of steam along the horizontal wellbore with a single-pipe well configuration and a dual-pipe well configuration was addressed. Subsequently, considering the effect of pressure drops and heat loss, a semianalytical model for the gas/liquid two-phase flow in the horizontal wellbore was developed to numerically match the experimental observation. Next, a sensitivity analysis on the physical parameters and operation properties of a steam injection process was conducted. The effect of the injection fluid type was also investigated. Experimental results indicated that under the same steam injection condition, an application of dual-pipe well configuration can significantly enhance the oil drainage volume by approximately 35% than the single-pipe well configuration. During the experiments, both a temperature distribution and liquid production along the horizontal wellbore were obtained. A bimodal temperature distribution can be observed for the dual-pipe well configuration. From this proposed model, an excellent agreement can be found between the simulation results and the experimental data. Because of the effect of variable mass flowing behavior and pressure drops, the wellbore segment close to the steam outflow point can have a higher heating radius than that far from the steam outflow point. From the results of sensitivity analysis, permeability heterogeneity and steam injection parameters have a tremendous impact on the steam injection profile along the wellbore. Compared with a pure steam injection process, the coinjection of steam and noncondensable gas (NCG) can improve the effective heating wellbore length by more than 25%. This model is also applied to predict the steam conformance of an actual horizontal well in Liaohe Oilfield. This paper presents some information regarding the heat and mass transfer of a dual-pipe horizontal well, as well as imparts some of the lessons learned from its field operation.