Condensate recovery from tight gas-condensate reservoirs using a new method based on a gas-based chemical

Recovery from gas condensate reservoirs, when the pressure is below dew point pressure (P_dew), is adversely affected by the accumulation of condensate in the near wellbore region. The mitigation of the near-well bore condensate banking is the main purpose of any enhanced recovery method implemented in gas condensate reservoirs. In this work, a new method was tested to improve condensate recovery by using a chemical that was delivered using hydrocarbon gas as a carrier into a very low permeability and very low porosity reservoir rock. Chemicals are typically injected using liquid carrier solvents. The use of hydrocarbon gas as the carrier provides a remedy to mitigate condensate banking in very low permeability cores by minimizing complications associated with low injectivity and back flow clean-up process requirements of an injected liquid. The chemical potential was evaluated by recording production data from unsteady-state coreflood experiments. The injection of the chemical with equilibrated gas resulted in condensate saturation to decrease from 19.6% to 6.5%. This decrease was not instantaneous and took some time to occur indicating that the chemical needs time to interact with the resident fluid and rock. The benefit of the method, at the field scale, was also estimated by performing single-well numerical simulations that use relative permeability (kr) data which history matched the measured coreflood production data. The results of these preliminary simulations also showed improved recovery of gas and condensate compared to pure depletion, without chemical, by around 40% for the cases considered.