The Experimental Study on the Flooding Regularities of Various CO2 Flooding Modes Implemented on Ultralow Permeability Cores

Abstract

The application of water flooding is not successful for the development of low permeability reservoirs due to the fine pore sizes and the difficulty of water injection operation. CO2 can dissolve readily in crude oil and highly improve the mobility of crude oil, which makes CO2 flooding an effective way to the development of the ultralow-permeability reservoirs. The regularities of various CO2 displacement methods were studied via experiments implemented on cores from Chang 8 Formation of Honghe Oilfield. The results show that CO2 miscible displacement has the minimum displacement differential pressure and the maximum oil recovery; CO2-alternating-water miscible flooding has lower oil recovery, higher drive pressure, and relatively lower gas-oil ratio; water flooding has the minimum oil recovery and the maximum driving pressure. A large amount of oil still can be produced under a high gas-oil ratio condition through CO2 displacement method. This fact proves that the increase of gas-oil ratio is caused by the production of dissolved CO2 in oil rather than the free gas breakthrough. At the initial stage of CO2 injection, CO2 does not improve the oil recovery immediately. As the injection continues, the oil recovery can be improved rapidly. This phenomenon suggests that when CO2 displacement is performed at high water cut period, the water cut does not decrease immediately and will remain high for a period of time, then a rapid decline of water cut and increase of oil production can be observed.