Systematic Investigation of Asphaltene Deposition in the Wellbore and Near-Wellbore Region of a Deepwater Oil Reservoir under Gas Injection. Part 2: Computational Fluid Dynamics Modeling of Asphaltene Deposition

Asphaltene deposition during oil production is a major flow assurance problem. The asphaltene deposit layer reduces the pipe cross-section, leading to a significant reduction in the flow rate and eventually plugging the pipeline. This flow assurance problem caused during oil production has motivated the development of several experimental and modeling techniques to investigate the asphaltene behavior. This study proposes an integrated approach to simultaneously model asphaltene precipitation, aggregation, and deposition on a single platform. It focuses on the development of a deposition simulator that performs thermodynamic modeling using the perturbed chain version of the statistical associating fluid theory equation of state (PC-SAFT EOS) and depicts the deposition profile by means of a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model based on the finite element method. In this work, the asphaltene deposition risk was assessed in the near-wellbore region and the production tubing as a result of gas breakthrough...