Scaling laws in cold heavy oil production with sand reservoirs

Abstract

This thesis presents a rigorous step by step procedure for deriving the minimum set of scaling laws for Cold Heavy Oil Production with Sand (CHOPS) reservoirs based on a given set of physical equations using inspectional analysis. The resulting dimensionless equations are then simulated in COMSOL Mutiphysics to validate the dimensionless groups and determine which groups are more significant by performing a sensitivity analysis using a factorial design. The work starts simple by demonstrating how the above process is done for 1D single-phase flow and then slowly ramps up the complexity to account for foamy oil and then finally for wormholes by using a sand failure criterion. The end result is three dimensionless partial differential equations to be solved simultaneously using a finite element simulator. The significance of these groups is that they can be used to extrapolate between a small scale model and a large scale prototype.