Prediction of Gas Injection Performance for Heterogeneous Reservoirs

This report describes research carried out in the Department of Petroleum Engineering at Stanford University from September 1996 - September 1997 under the first year of a three-year Department of Energy grant on the Prediction of Gas Injection Performance for Heterogeneous Reservoirs. The research effort is an integrated study of the factors affecting gas injection, from the pore scale to the field scale, and involves theoretical analysis, laboratory experiments and numerical simulation. The original proposal described research in four main areas; (1) Pore scale modeling of three phase flow in porous media; (2) Laboratory experiments and analysis of factors influencing gas injection performance at the core scale with an emphasis on the fundamentals of three phase flow; (3) Benchmark simulations of gas injection at the field scale; and (4) Development of streamline-based reservoir simulator. Each stage of the research is planned to provide input and insight into the next stage, such that at the end we should have an integrated understanding of the key factors affecting field scale displacements