SPE 133594

Optimization of Carbon Dioxide Sequestration and Enhanced Oil Recovery

in Oil Reservoir
Hamid Reza Jahangiri, Dongxiao Zhang, SPE, University of Southern California

Copyright 2010, Society of Petroleum Engineers

This paper was prepared for presentation at the Western North America Regional Meeting held in Anaheim, California, USA, 26–30 May 2010.

This paper was selected for presentation by an SPE program committee following review of information contained in an abstract submitted by the author(s). Contents of the paper have not been
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Abstract
Carbon dioxide (CO2) storage into depleted or partially depleted oil reservoirs is an immediate option for reducing CO2
emissions into the atmosphere. This process, if implemented in depleted oil reservoirs, combines environmental benefits of
reducing CO2 emissions and economical benefits of maximizing oil recovery. CO2 Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) processes,
to date, have attempted to minimize the amount of CO2 needed to recover each barrel of oil. For a sequestration process,
however, the aim is to maximize the amount of CO2 stored. If CO2 emissions are regulated, CO2-EOR process may therefore
be able to earn sequestration credits in addition to oil revenues.
This paper discusses the effects of several injection strategies and injection timing on optimization of oil recovery and CO2
storage capacity for a synthetic, three dimensional, heterogeneous reservoir models. A simulation study was completed using a
3-D compositional simulator “ECLIPSE 300” in order to optimize oil recovery and CO2 storage. The study proceeded through
the following steps: 1) comparison of different injection schemes; 2) testing the effect of injection rate on the CO2 storage
capacity. The results show that innovative reservoir engineering techniques are required for cooptimizing CO2 storage and oil
recovery.

Introduction
Carbon dioxide emission owing to the combustion of fossil fuels is believed to be one of the main causes of global change..
More than 85 percent of the world’s energy needs are supplied by fossil fuels and the demand for fossil fuels is increasing [1].
Many analysts believe that the only way to resolve the growth in the use of fossil with limits on carbon dioxide emission is
through the deployment of carbon sequestration. Oil and gas reservoirs are good candidates for sequestration because
industrial experiences already exist for CO2 injection. Carbon dioxide has been injected for Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR)
since the 1970s. The main factor impacting the efficiency of EOR with CO2 injection is the miscibility of CO2 in the oil phase
[2,3,4]. At pressures greater than the minimum miscibility pressure (MMP), oil and CO2 are mutually soluble. The dissolved
CO2 reduces the viscosity of the oil and causes swelling of the oil phase, hence improving its ability to flow through the
reservoir rock. To date, CO2 injection projects have focused on oil with densities ranging from 29 to 48 °API (855 to 711
kg/m3) and reservoir depth from 760 to 3700 m( 2600 ft to 12000 ft) [5]. Screening criteria for selecting reservoirs where CO2
may sustain or increase the production have been proposed. It is estimated that if the only considerations are depth and gravity,
80 % of the world's reservoirs might be suitable for CO2 injection based upon EOR only [5,6] . Carbon dioxide injection in
mature or partially depleted oil and gas reservoir has environmental benefits since large amounts of CO2 could be sequestrated
away from the atmosphere. To date, injection processes have been designed to minimize the amount of CO2 injected per barrel
of oil produced, thereby minimizing the purchase cost of CO2. However, when the goal is to store carbon dioxide, the design
question changes significantly [7]. Oil recovery processes need to be modified to store the maximum amount of CO2 in the
reservoir as well as to maximize oil recovery.
In this study, our main goal is to develop carbon dioxide injection strategies leading to cooptimization. The focus here is
developing effective methods that cooptimize CO2 storage and oil recovery for a given reservoir and fixed well placement. It is
assumed that sequestration services provide a significant revenue. The reservoir model and fluids are summarized in the next
section. Then, we focus on developing CO2 injection scenarios leading to cooptimization. The results of the various injection
schemes and optimization of them are presented next. These results are obtained using a compositional, reservoir flow
simulator. At the end, the conclusions are given.
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Reservoir Description
Our study is based on PUNQ-S3, a synthetic reservoir developed on the basis of an actual producing field [8, 10]. The
geostatistical data of PUNQ-S3 are available electronically [9]. The porosity and permeability maps of the reservoir model are
shown in Figure 1 and Figure 2. The initial reservoir pressure is 253 bars.

Figure 1. Permeability distribution of reference model

The depth of the top of the reservoir is about 2340 meters and the mean reservoir thickness is 28 m. An average horizontal
permeability is on the order of 100 md and a sand porosity of roughly 0.20 [10]. The ratio of average horizontal to vertical
permeability is about 3. In addition, the reservoir pore volume is relatively small, being 30 × 106 m3, whereas the initial
average oil saturation is 0.60. The model contains 19×28×5 grid blocks, of which 1761 blocks are active. The x and y
dimensions of each grid block are 180 m. The model is divided into 5 layers vertically and named 1 to 5 from top to bottom.
The average thickness is 2.7, 4.8, 6.7, 6.7 and 6.7 meters for layers 1 to 5, respectively [10].

Figure 2. Porosity distribution of reference model

There are four producing and four injection wells. The locations of these wells are shown in Figure 3. These wells are
completed to flow at the third, fourth and fifth layers of the reservoir. A North Sea crude oil is selected as the reservoir fluid,
because it exhibits black-oil properties similar to those given with PUNQ-S3 in a previous study [10].
SPE 133594 3

Figure 3. Top view of reference model and well location

Table 1 shows the composition of the reservoir fluid [10]. It is a moderately heavy (24 ºAPI, 910 kg/m3) crude oil. Pure CO2
and the reservoir fluid are not mutually miscible at reservoir pressure. The minimum miscibility pressure (MMP) of pure CO2
is estimated to be in excess of 608 bars using the rapid estimation technique of Wang and Orr [11]. On the other hand, the
initial reservoir pressure is 253 bars. Thus, the reservoir is not a good candidate for CO2-EOR. Due to displacement efficiency
solvent injection is recommended as a means of oil recovery. The solvent is designed to contain 66.7% of CO2 with 2.5% of
ethane (C2) and propane (C3) and 8.3% butane (C4) that allow miscibility to develop. The relative permeability data was used
from previous studies [10]. In addition, for simplicity the capillary pressures among oil, water, and gas phases are taken as 0.
Table 1. Compsoition description of oil composition
Component Mole fraction Molecular weight (kg/mole) Tc(K) Pc(bar)
CO2 0 0.04401 304.2 72.9
CH4 0.4383 0.01604 190.6 45.4
C2H6 0.04262 0.03007 305.4 48.2
C3H8 0.009153 0.04410 369.8 41.9
i-Butane-C4H10 0.005824 0.05812 408.1 36.0
n-Butane-C4H10 0.005395 0.05812 425.2 37.5
i-Pentane-C5H12 0.006771 0.07215 460.4 33.4
n-Pentane-C5H12 0.003081 0.07215 469.6 33.3
C6 0.01063 0.08617 507.4 29.3
C7 0.2359 0.1355 623.9 30.4
C8-C15 0.1189 0.2489 708.6 20.4
C16-C23 0.07894 0.3812 795.7 16.5
C24+ 0.04456 0.6322 947.9 14.5

Methodology
Our main goal is to find injection scenarios leading to maximum oil recovery with simultaneous maximum emplacement of
CO2 in the reservoir. To achieve this goal, reservoir simulations are performed with ECLIPSE300 [12], a fully compositional,
finite difference based reservoir simulator.
In a cooptimization procedure, we need to evaluate the performance of different scenarios; the objective function was defined
in Kovscek and Cakici [11]:
4 SPE 133594

Re s
N V
f = w 1 P + w 2 CO 2
(1)
OOIP PV
Re s
where Np is the cumulative oil recovery, and OOIP is the original oil in place, VCO is the volume of CO2 stored in the
2

reservoir, and PV is the pore volume of the reservoir and w1 ( 0≤ w1 ≤ 1) and w2 (= 1 – w1), are weights. This equation
combines parameters that we want to optimize. The first term on the right is a dimensionless oil recovery factor and the second
term is a dimensionless CO2 storage factor. The weights for both terms are chosen with respect to the goals of the recovery
process. An equal weighting (w1 = w2 = 0.5) would place equal emphasis on oil recovery and CO2 storage. If the aim is to
maximize oil recovery, w1 is taken as 1, whereas if the goal is to increase CO2 storage w2 is taken as 1. The relative
prices/costs of oil and gas cycling and injection determine the weight of each term. In this study, an equal weighting was used.
Because the volume of CO2 is dynamic parameter and depends on the pressure and temperature of reservoir and whether CO2
is stored as a supercrical or gas phase, or in a dissolved form, it seems that the second term can not be a good indicator of
reservoir storage of CO2. Hence, instead of defining the volume ratio of CO2 stored in reservoir we have introduced the storage
factor by using the mass of CO2 stored in reservoir over the total storage capacity of the reservoir. This factor is not affected
by whether and how much CO2 is stored as supercritical or gas phase, or in the dissolved form. With this, the objective
function can be rewritten as:

NP Mass of CO 2 stored
f =w1 +w 2 (2)
OOIP Total capacity of CO 2
A variety of schemes are tested like Kovscek and Cakici [11] that are summarized as

• continuous gas injection

• gas injection after water flooding (GAW)
• water alternating gas drive (WAG)
The first scenario is simulated twice using pure CO2 and solvent injection fluid, and the other cases are simulated with pure
CO2. For the reference case, production wells operate at a fixed pressure of 175 bars. Gas is injected at a rate of 400,000
m3/day per well (at standard conditions). Gas injection after water flooding is used where water is used to maintain pressure
and drive oil from the reservoir. After some volume of water injection, the injection is switched to gas injection as a means of
sequestering CO2. Again, production wells operate at a fixed pressure of 175 bars. Water is injected at a rate of 1000 m3/day
per well until injection is switched to CO2 at 400,000 m3/day (at standard conditions). The WAG scheme injects water and
CO2 in alternating slugs. WAG processes were developed to overcome having low viscosity of gas injection compared to oil.
In this procedure, gas is trying to displace oil in the upper part of the reservoir and water invades lower parts. The combined
effect is giving overall better vertical sweep efficiency. Equal volumes of water and gas are injected during each slug because
the optimal WAG ratio (volume of water to that of gas in a slug) is approximately 1 for our reservoir and fluid models [13].
Production wells still operate at a fixed pressure of 175 bars. The injection rate of water is 1000 m3/day, whereas that of CO2
3
or solvent is 400,000 m /day (at standard conditions). We implement the optimization algorithm such that the performance of
the reservoir for a particular set of settings can be determined via forward simulations. In the CO2 EOR-Sequestration
optimization problem, the control parameters may be injection rate, fluid production rate, and bottomhole pressure of
production wells. In this study, the injectors are controlled by injection rate and the producers are controlled by bottom-hole
pressure. In this paper we use Differential Evolution algorithm [14, 15] for optimization of objective function during the
reservoir life.
Results
As we discussed earlier, in the reference case used for comparison, the total water injection rate and the total fluid production
target are equally distributed among the injectors and producers, so all the injectors are controlled by the water injection rate of
1000 m3/day and gas rate of 400,000 m3/day, and all the producers are controlled by the bottom hole pressure of 175 bars.
These reference cases are similar to previous works [11, 13]. They also served as the initial guess for the optimal control
function in the optimization procedure. Figure 4 summarizes the performance of the continuous pure CO2 and solvent
injection, GAW and WAG schemes discussed above in the reference cases.
SPE 133594 5

Figure 4. (a) Cummulative oil production, (b) Recovery factor, (c) Moles of CO2 stored, and (d) Mass of CO2 storage
factor for different injection schemes in reference case
In terms of oli recovery, it can be obtained that solvent injection is the best scheme because of miscibility of injection gas and
oil. WAG scenario has the second rank because the denser phase, water sweeps the lower portion of the reservoir while the gas
sweeps the upper portion. As seen in the figure, WAG performs the worst among all methods in CO2 sequestration. This is
caused by the injection of water through the production period, which results in limited reservoir pore volume utilization for
CO2 storage.

Figure 5. Comparison of objective function of different injection schemes in the reference case

Figure 5 compares the objective function, which is defined before. Equal weight is given to oil recovery and reservoir storage.
Solvent injection scheme performs much better than WAGs. However, results from continous gas injection processes – both
6 SPE 133594

for CO2 and solvent – are almost 100% higher than these. The maximum value for objective function is obtained for a solvent
in which the miscibility increases oil recovery and the gas injection contributes toward the storage goal.
Figure 6 shows the result of all scenarios after calculating the optimal bottome-hole pressure which is 215 bars by DE
algorithm. The result indicates that the improvement is up to 16% in recovery factor and 25% in CO2 storage compared to the
refrence cases.

Figure 6. (a) Cummulative oil production, (b) Recovery factor, (c) Moles of CO2 stored, and (d) Mass of CO2 storage
factor for different injection schemes in optimized BHP of production wells

Figure 7. Comparison of objective function of different injection schemes in optimized BHP of production wells and
reference case
SPE 133594 7

Figure 7 shows the results for optimized bottom-hole pressure of production well in different schemes. For all cases considered
an improvement in NPV with respect to the reference case was found, ranging from 15-20%. In this case, we optimized the
CO2 EOR-SEQ by controlling the injection rate of injcetors. Hence, we have four wells and four control parameters. The
optimization was done for solvent and pure CO2 injection scenario. For each reservoir the optimized results are compared with
results from the corresponding reference case.

Figure 8. comparison of (a) Cummulative oil production, (b) Recovery factor, (c) Moles of CO2 stored, and (d) Mass of
CO2 storage factor for different injection schemes in optimized rate of injection wells and reference case
Results for the reference and optimized cases are presented in Figure 8. Total injection rates are constant and equal to
1,600,000 m3/day and the upper limit and lower limit of injection rate of each wells are 600,000 m3/day and 200,000 m3/day,
respectively. Best values for these parameters after optimization are given in Table 2.
Table 2. Injectin rate of optimized case for different injection schemes
3 3
Well Injection rate(m /day)-Solvent Injection Injection rate(m /day)-Pure CO2 Injection
Inj 1 586530 577860
Inj 2 229450 232590
Inj 3 583130 588330
Inj 4 200890 201220

It can be seen that best results happen when injection wells Inj 1 and Inj 2 inject at their maximum injection rates while Inj 2
and Inj 4 operate at minimum rates. As can be seen in the Figure 8, for all cases considered an improvement in recovery factor
and storage factore with respect to the reference case was found, ranging from10-15%.
We observe that if we controlled the injection rate of each wells we could get better results even though the number of control
parameters increase and run time of optimization increase.
8 SPE 133594

Figure 9. Comparison of objective function of different injection schemes in optimized rate of injection wells and
reference case
Figure 9 compares the objective function of solvent and CO2 injection in the refrence and optimized cases. The increase in
objective function resulted from a slight to moderate increase in oil production combined with increase in CO2 stoarage. The
increasee in cumulative oil production is due to maintaining injection rate of wells located in high permeability zone in lower
limit and maximizing the rate of wells located in low permeability zone. Gas production is also delayed and considerably
reduced. As a result, the total CO2 stored is enhanced.
Conclusions
Oil fields are expected to be one of the first options where carbon dioxide is injected for sequestration because the oil industry
has had extensive experience in the use of CO2 for enhanced oil recovery. The goal to sequester maximum carbon dioxide
while maximizing oil recovery rate from an oil reservoir is largely different from the goal of oil recovery alone. Successful
CO2-EOR processes have minimized the mass of CO2 needed to recover a barrel of oil. The problem of increasing CO2
stoargae while recovering maximum oil is complicated. One of the methods for maximizing storage is minimization of CO2
production from the reservoir during oil production. Carbon dioxide is relatively mobile in reservoir media as compared to oil
and water due to its low viscosity. We have modified the objective function compared to previous studies to better analyze the
EOR combined sequetration processes. An effective process for cooptimization of CO2 sequestration and oil recovery is a kind
of well control that constrains the rate of injection and production. Results of different scenarios indicate that adjusting
injection gas composition to maximize CO2 concentration while maintaining an appropriate MMP is need. The calculations
reported here for a specific hetrogenous reservoir suggest the designing strategy to create injection profiles to increase the
CO2 storage, which reduce the unfavorable effects of preferential flow of injected gas through high permeability zones.
The optimization process showed an improvement in objective function value of up to 10% from the initial base case as well
as an improvement of cumulative production of up to 8% from the base case. This approach has been applied to a simple 3-D
heterogeneous reservoir with known geology. Further work can be carried out on reservoir geology while considering
uncertainties in the reservoir model parameters and also on large scale field examples. Another complication left for future
work concerns the effect of vaious oil prices and carbon taxes on both the optimal management of a CO2 injection and decision
to initate such a process.
Nomenclature
f objective function
Np cumulative oil recovery
OOIP original oil in place
PV pore volume of reservoir

VCORe s
2
CO2 volume of the reservoir pore space filled with CO2
SPE 133594 9

w1 weight of oil recovery term in objective function

w2 weight of CO2 storage term in objective function
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