Abstract:

Steam overlapping and steam channeling decrease sweeping efficiency of steam drive while steamdrive exploiting heavy oil reservoirs. Thermal foam drive, steam drive by adding noncondensing gas and hightemperature foaming agent, shows effective recovery performances in foreign and domestic researches and applications. The recovery efficiency of thermal foam drive with displacement experiment and numerical stimulation is researched. The results indicate thermal foam flooding effectively improves displacement efficiency of steam drive and the oil recovery efficiency increases 38.5% in the experiment, up to 81.0%. The numerical stimulation of Gaosheng block in Liaohe oil field shows that recovery efficiency of thermal foam drive is higher than steam drive. Foam can block steam channeling and decrease steam overlapping, improve temperature distribution in reservoirs and thermal foam drive is an effective EOR method.

Key words: EOR, experiment research, numerical stimulation, heavy oil, nitrogen foam