Comprehensive Review of Worldwide CO2 Immiscible Flooding

Abstract Carbon dioxide (CO2) flooding is a mature technology in oil industry, which finds broad attention in oil production during tertiary oil recovery (EOR). After five decade's developments, there are many successful reports for CO2 miscible flooding. However, operators recognized that achieving miscible phase is one of big challenge in fields with extremely high minimum miscible pressure (MMP) after considering the safety and economics. Compared with CO2 miscible flooding, immiscible CO2 flooding demonstrates the great potentials under varying reservoir/fluid conditions. A comprehensive and high-quality data set for CO2 immiscible flooding are built by collecting various data from books, DOE reports, AAPG database, oil and gas biennially EOR survey, field reports and SPE publications. Important reservoir/fluid information, operational parameters and project performance evaluations are included, which provides the basis for comprehensive data analysis. Combination plot of boxplot and histogram are generated, where boxplots are used to detect the special cases and to summarize the ranges of each parameter; histograms display the distribution of each parameter and to identify the best suitable ranges for propose guidelines. Results show that CO2 immiscible flooding could recover additional 4.7 to 12.5% of oil with average injection efficiency of 10.07 Mscf/stb; CO2 immiscible technique can be implemented in light/medium/heavy oil reservoirs with a wide range of net thickness (5.2 - 300 ft); yet in heavy oil specifically reservoir (oil gravity <25 °API) with thin layer (net thickness< 50 ft) is better.