Design and Operation of Laboratory Combustion Cell for Air Injection into Light Oil Reservoirs: Potential Application in Sindh Field

Historical experimental work on the combustion oil recovery processes consists of both laboratory and field studies. Although field experiments are the ultimate test of any oil recovery process, they are costly, time consuming and difficult to analyze quantitatively. Laboratory CC (Combustion Cell) experiments are cost effective and less time consuming, but are subject to scaling and interpretation challenges. Experimental set up has been developed to understand air injection process for improving oil recovery from light oil reservoirs taking into account the sand pack petro physical and fluid properties. Some important design problems; operational criteria and considerations important to interpretation of results are pointed out. To replicate subsurface reservoir conditions or pressure and temperature, experiments up to 6895 KPa, at non-isothermal conditions with 5 o C/min ramp-up are performed on unconsolidated cores with reservoir oil samples. Correlations were obtained for low temperature oxidation rate of oil, the fuel deposition rate and the rate of burning fuel as a fuel concentration. Various parameters such as (sand pack, pressure, oil saturation and flow rate/air flux) were changed to investigate their impact on reaction and chemical nature of the fuel burned. To determine the importance of distribution and pyrolysis on these reactions, the hydrogen-carbon ratio and m-ratio was calculated. For further confirmation Arrhenius graphs were drawn by assuming 1.0 order of reaction with carbon concentration which is also confirmed. Recovery) phase of