2008 Annual Meeting

(172b) Heavy Oil Combustion In Porous Media and Fractured System

Authors

Gerald Debenest - Presenter, Institut de Mécanique des Fluides de Toulouse
Alexandre Lapene, Institut de Mécanique des Fluides de Toulouse (I.M.F.T) / TOTAL
Michel Quintard, Institut de Mécanique des Fluides
Arjan Kamp, Chloe
The aim of this paper is to present the preliminary results obtained in two studies performed at IMFT Lab. regarding in-situ combustion of heavy oil. We are working on EOR (Enhanced oil recovery) in different geological systems containing a significant amount of heavy oil.

One concerns the water effects on oil combustion. The experimental work performed has shown an important effect of water in the vapor phase on some reactions and this is not taken into account in general in the reactive scheme used.

The second study is about combustion in fractured system. A

characterization of the front propagation has been made by varying the transport coefficients (such as effective diffusion coefficient in the matrix part of the medium and permeability in the fracture zone). The results show that combustion process is mainly governed by diffusion in the matrix.

Some multi-blocks simulations will be given.