Simulation Investigation and Interpretation of Carbonated Water Injection in a Single Matrix Block

Carbonated water injection is one of the modern enhanced oil recovery techniques that has numerous privileges over other recovery methods including waterflooding and CO۲ injection. This method leads to lower residual oil saturation, higher sweep efficiency, less gravity segregation, and less fingering phenomenon, rather than the other techniques. Despite these numbers of advantages of this method over others, there are few modeling/ simulation studies on this subject. The reason is that there are limited experimental data in this domain to role as validation and support. In this study, the carbonated water injection in a single matrix block is simulated by COMSOL Multiphysics. For higher accuracy, ۳ different physics are coupled in the simulation section. Moreover, the effect of the CO۲ diffusion coefficient on the oil density is investigated. To highlight the impact of gravitational force, as a driving mechanism along with the injection and capillary forces, the sensitivity analysis is done on this mechanism.

Keywords:

Carbonated water injection , Diffusion , Convection , Oil density , Gravitational force.