Effect of Depletion Rate on Gas Mobility and Solution Gas Drive in Heavy Oil

Summary Some heavy oil reservoirs in western Canada and Venezuela show anomalously high primary recovery under solution gas drive process. The pressure decline rate in these reservoirs is low compared to that expected under solution gas drive in conventional oil reservoirs. There is now increasing evidence that gas mobility is extremely low in these reservoirs. The objective of this study is to conduct solution gas drive experiments in a sandpack saturated with a heavy oil and examine the effect of depletion rate. Depletion rate was varied by more than two orders of magnitude. The results showed that gas mobility was a function of depletion rate and decreased with increasing depletion rate. Other notable observations were that supersaturation increased with depletion rate and that critical gas saturation was 3 to 4%, slightly increasing with increasing depletion rate. Interpretation of the results confirmed that gas mobility is quite low. Representation of the low mobilities using relative permeability required low values of the order of 10−5–10−4, which decreased with increasing depletion rate.