Evaluation of the Behavior of Heavy Oil Reservoir Using the THAI T e chnique ( T oe T o Heel Air Injection) Evaluación del comportamiento de un yacimiento de crudo pesado mediante la aplicación de la técnica THAI “Toe To Heel Air Injection”

Abstract

This research was developed to verify the results presented in literature about  implementation of recovery techniques on heavy oils and bitumen, and as a complement of some research projects previously developed. In this document it’s presented the study, analysis and evaluation of the behavior for a heavy oil reservoir using the THAI (Toe - To - Heel Air Injection) technique for horizontal wells. This simulation was performed using the therm al simulator (Eclipse - Office), keeping in mind that this is a thermal recovery process, applied to heavy oils and bitumen where is  necessary to involve thermo - dynamical, thermo - chemical, chemical and  stequiometrical variables.
The first part of this resea rch analyzes the best successful configuration techniques for the wells in order to implement a pilot test. After the results are obtained from the  previous analysis, some key heavy oil reservoir properties are evaluated and analyzed, such as thickness, po rosity, initial oil saturation, permeability ratio, horizontal permeability, and depth and reservoir pressure. The second part of this study consists on the study of the operating conditions for the THAI technique in a well - defined reservoir. The third part consisted on design a two continuous producing layer reservoir to analyze the effect of the heterogeneity in the development of the THAI technique, where the impact on the production and recovery were analyzed. Also the production behavior of the heavy o il reservoir was compared with the production in cold, with the same designed reservoir using the THAI technique. Finally a reservoir with two pairs of wells was designed to analyze the behavior of this technique in an oil field.