Investigation of Revaporization of Retrograde Condensate

Abstract A series of experiments have been carried out in order to quantitatively investigate the revaporization efficiency of retrograde condensate by dry gas injection. The experiment includes three main parts: (1) gas injection below the dew point pressure in the PVT cell, (2) gas injection above and (3) below the dew point pressure in a long-core flooding apparatus. Instead of the simple synthetic fluid and the packed core systems usually used in the previous literature, an actual gas condensate fluid and an approximately one meter long-core were employed here. The tests with long-core apparatus show that more condensate above the dew point is recovered than below the dewpoint, forcefully justifying the traditional argument that the full pressure maintenance is superior to the partial pressure maintenance according to the condensate recovery. An interesting discovery is that dry gas can effectively revaporize not only the intermediate but also the heavy hydrocarbons (i.e., C20+), which is in contrary with the common belief that the heavy hydrocarbon cannot be revaporized by dry gas.