Determination of Concentration-Dependent Effective Diffusivity of Each Gas Component of a Binary Mixture in Porous Media Saturated with Heavy Oil under Reservoir Conditions

One frequently used enhanced heavy oil recovery technique is gas injection, during which heavy oil viscosity is reduced due to diffusion of gaseous components and heavy oil swelling in porous media. Effective diffusivities of gas components are generally assumed to be constants, while no attempts have been made to determine both the concentration-dependent effective diffusivity in porous media saturated with heavy oil and the preferential contribution of each component in a binary/ternary gas mixture. In this study, a pragmatic and robust technique has been proposed to determine the concentration-dependent effective diffusivity of each gas component by reproducing the experimental measurements during pressure decay tests for CO2-C3H8-heavy oil systems in porous media. Experimentally, CO2 and C3H8 are utilized to diffuse into sandpacks fully saturated with heavy oil. Under a constant temperature within a thermostatic chamber, the pressures of the aforementioned gas(es)-heavy oil systems are consistently tracked and saved while gas samples are taken at the start and end of the diffusion tests for gas chromatography analyses. Theoretically, a mass transfer model is formulated to determine effective gas diffusivity in heavy oil as a concentration-dependent function by incorporating Fick’s second law and the modified Peng-Robinson equation of state (PR EOS). The concentration-dependent effective diffusivity for each gas component is ascertained when the measured pressure profiles and gas compositions are matched well to their correspondingly calculated values with minimum deviations. Compared to either a constant assumption or a linear concentration-dependent relation with respect to diffusivity, an exponential concentration-dependent relation leads to more accurately reproducing the measured pressure profiles. Compared with pure CO2, its effective diffusivity in a binary (i.e., CO2 and C3H8) gas system is found to be larger, indicating that C3H8 accelerates the CO2 mass transfer into heavy oil under the same circumstances. Furthermore, this study confirms that a larger tortuosity of a porous medium leads to a longer diffusion path with less contact between gas and liquid phases and that a lower concentration of a gaseous component yields a lower effective diffusivity.