Quantification of Gas Exsolution Dynamics for Solvent-Heavy Oil Systems Under Reservoir Conditions

Experimental and theoretical techniques have been developed to quantify foamy oil behaviour of solvent-heavy oil systems at bubble level during a gas exsolution process. During constant composition expansion (CCE) tests, we artificially induced foamy oil dynamics for solvent-heavy oil systems by gradually reducing pressure and recorded the changed pressures and volumes in an isolated PVT setup at a given temperature. By discretizing gas bubbles on the basis of the classical nucleation theory, we theoretically integrated the population balance equation (PBE), Fick’s law, and the Peng–Robinson equation of state (PR EOS) to reproduce the experimental measurements. Pseudo-bubblepoint pressure for a given solvent-heavy oil system can be increased with either a lower pressure depletion rate or a higher temperature, during which gas bubble growth is facilitated with a reduction in viscosity and/or an increase in solvent concentration, but gas bubble nucleation and mitigation is hindered with an increase in solvent concentration. Compared to CO2, CH4 is found to yield stronger and more stable foamy oil, indicating that foamy oil is more stable with a larger amount of dispersed gas bubbles at lower temperatures. Using the PR EOS together with the modified alpha functions at Tr = 0.7 and Tr = 0.6, the absolute average relative deviation (AARD) is reduced from 4.58% to 2.24% with respect to the predicted pseudo-bubblepoint pressures.