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« Back to Applications Overview |
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Heavy Oil
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APPLICATIONS » As higher-gravity crude oils (lighter oil) become increasingly scarce in the U.S., American operators are looking more and more to low-gravity crude oils (heavy oil) to prop up the Nation’s declining oil output. Of course, virtually all oil producing countries are seeking to increase the recovery volume and efficiency of their heavy oil resources as well. Heavy oil generally is defined as having an API (American Petroleum Institute) gravity of 10-20 degrees API. The original-oil-in-place (OOIP) volume of heavy oil in the United States was 105 billion barrels. U.S. heavy oil cumulative production to date totals about 13 billion barrels. This relatively small percentage of recovery is because heavy oil is an especially difficult hydrocarbon resource to recover due to its extremely high viscosity at typical reservoir conditions. These crude oils can range from the 1,000’s to over 1,000,000 cp viscosity at reservoir conditions. This tremendously elevated viscosity means that it has a very high resistance to flow, even in a reservoir with high permeability formation rock.
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Technologies are required that will reduce the apparent viscosities of the heavy oil or have another mechanism such as solubilizing the hydrocarbon in place to increase the flow rate and recover enough heavy oil to be economically attractive.
ChemEOR offers a series of viscosity thinning agents that assist in the improved recovery and also the transportation of heavy oil:
- SurFlood HORA » Heavy Oil Recovery Agent for IOR / EOR and flow assurance
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SurFlood HORA »
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Cold production methods for heavy crude oils is becoming a more attractive idea as it is simpler and less expensive than thermal methods, and opens up additional heavy oil resources for production. Towards that end ChemEOR has developed unique customized surfactant formulations called SurFlood HORA series designed to address this need (Figure1). Some of the HORA products also are very good as supplemental additives to make a thermal EOR operation increase heavy oil recovery even further.
| Figure 1. Demonstration of Heavy Oil Recovery by a HORA solution |
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