EXPERIMENTAL INVESTIGATION OF DIFFERENT STEAM INJECTION SCENARIOS DURING SAGD PROCESS

The steam-assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) process has been studied experimentally in heavy oil sand-packed models using different scenarios of steam injection. In this study, cyclic and continuous steam injection were used separately and in combination to find the optimal arrangement process. Different scenarios of the SAGD process, including combination of continuous and cyclic steam injection from the top of the sand-packed model and cyclic injection from the bottom, were performed separately. It was found that for the long model, continuous steam injection would result in more oil recovery compared to cyclic steam injection. Experimental results also showed that more oil has been produced during the gravity drainage process after continuous steam injection compared to the cyclic steam injection. In addition, the effect of wettability on the oil production was investigated for both steam injection and gravity drainage processes. It was also found that oil recovery in both water-wet and oil-wet media followed the same trend; however, the amount of recovered oil from water-wet media in each time step was greater compared to the oil-wet test.