The effect of temperature dependent relative permeability on heavy oil recovery during hot water injection process using streamline-based simulation

Extraction of heavy viscous oil from oilfields requires thermal enhanced oil recovery techniques to reduce the oil viscosity and improve its mobility. Usually, in these problems the effects of temperature on the relative permeability are ignored. In this paper, hot water injection into oil reservoirs (3D heterogeneous porous media) with temperature dependent viscosity and relative permeability functions is simulated numerically using an improved streamline approach to enhance computational performance. To this end, pressure and conduction equations are solved simultaneously on a 3D Eulerian grid, and saturation and heat convection equations are solved along multiple 1D streamlines. Results of the old and the modified thermal streamline simulator are compared in terms of the norm of error, and a significant improvement in accuracy of results is observed. Finally, the new numerical simulator employed to investigate effects of temperature dependent relative permeability on oil recovery of four sample heavy oilfields. It has been shown that these effects have a remarkable impact on the efficiency of hot water injection process and large errors can be caused, ignoring relative permeability changes with temperature in realistic reservoirs.