Reservoir Drive Mechanisms

There are three distinct phases of oil recovery from an oil reservoir, namely primary
recovery, secondary oil recovery and enhanced oil recovery.

After the well has been completed, gas and oil begin their journey from the reservoir to
the surface. This first period in the producing life of a reservoir is called primary
recovery or primary production. During this stage, natural energy in the reservoir often
displaces the hydrocarbons from the pores of a formation and drives it toward the wells
and sometimes up to the surface resulting with artesian flow. If the energy of the
reservoir is not sufficient to bring the fluid up to the surface an artificial lift method is
applied to bring the fluid to the surface.

Over the lifetime of the well the pressure will fall, and at some point there will be
insufficient underground pressure to force the oil to the surface. After natural reservoir
drive diminishes, secondary recovery methods are applied. They rely on the supply of
external energy into the reservoir in the form of injecting fluids to increase reservoir
pressure, hence replacing or increasing the natural reservoir drive with an artificial drive.
Secondary recovery techniques increase the reservoir's pressure by water injection,
natural gas reinjection and gas lift, which injects air, carbon dioxide or some other gas
into the bottom of an active well, reducing the overall density of fluid in the wellbore.

Enhanced oil recovery is known as an oil recovery enhancement method using

sophisticated techniques that alter the original properties of oil. Once ranked as a third
stage of oil recovery that was carried out after secondary recovery, the techniques
employed during enhanced oil recovery can actually be initiated at any time during the
productive life of an oil reservoir. Its purpose is not only to restore formation pressure,
but also to improve oil displacement or fluid flow in the reservoir. The three major types
of enhanced oil recovery operations are chemical flooding (alkaline flooding or micellar-
polymer flooding), miscible displacement (carbon dioxide [CO2] injection or
hydrocarbon injection), and thermal recovery (steamflood or in-situ combustion). The
optimal application of each type depends on reservoir temperature, pressure, depth, net
pay, permeability, residual oil and water saturations, porosity and fluid properties such as
oil API gravity and viscosity. Enhanced oil recovery is also known as tertiary recovery
and it is abbreviated as EOR.

Primary recovery is based on natural energy of the reservoir and there are number of
drive mechanism, namely depletion drive, water drive, compaction drive and gravity
drive. Among these four natural drive mechanism the two main drive mechanisms are
depletion drive and water drive.

Depletion Drive Reservoirs: A depletion type reservoir is a hydrocarbon reservoir which

is not in contact with a large body of water reservoir (aquifer). In this type of reservoirs
the energy comes from the expansion of the fluids in the reservoir (oil, water and gas) as
well as its associated pore space.

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The two types of depletion drives are dissolved-gas drives (solution-gas drive) and gas-
cap drives. They are called depletion drives because when the gas is gone, or depleted,
the pressure that drives the oil out is gone. When the drive gives out, a service crew must
add a pump or some other sort of artificial lift to the well to supplement the natural drive.
Both types of depletion drives work because the pressure of a gas is related to its volume,
or the space it fills. A compressed gas, like the air in a tire, has a high pressure. In other
words, the air presses out against the walls of the tire with greater and greater strength as
more air is forced into the space inside the tire. When the air is released to the outside of
the tire, it expands into the atmosphere and loses pressure; the tire goes flat.

In dissolved-gas drive reservoirs the initial condition is where the reservoir is

undersaturated, reservoir pressure is above bubble-point. Production of fluids down to
bubble point relies on the effective compressibility of the system which includes weighted
compressibility of all reservoir components (hydrocarbon liquids, connate water and pore
compressibility). This part of the depletion can also be called as compressibility drive.
The low compressibility of the system results with rapid pressure decline and resulting
with low recovery. Off the three compressibilities, although it is the oil compressibility
which is the larger (oil is considered as slightly compressible fluid because of dissolved
gas), the impact of the other compressibility components, the water and the pore space,
should not be neglected.

As pressure is reduced, oil expands due to its compressibility and eventually gas comes
out solution from the oil as the bubble point pressure of the fluid is reached. The
expanding gas provides the force to drive the oil hence the solution- gas drive. Gas has
high compressibility compared to liquid and therefore the pressure decline is reduced.
Solution-gas drive only occurs once the bubble pressure has been reached.

Figure 1. Dissolved - gas reservoir a) Above bubble-point pressure (liquid oil) b) Below
bubble-point pressure, liquid oil + liberated gas (solution-gas drive).

A dissolved gas-drive works because some of the hydrocarbons in the oil are light enough
that they become gaseous when the well releases pressure from the reservoir. The amount
of oil recovered varies from 3 to 30 percent. Usually, dissolved gas-driven wells produce

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little or no water. The phase transition of an undersaturated oil during depletion is
depicted in Figure 2. Away from the wellbore, zone A, where the pressure is still above
the bubble point, the oil expands as a single-phase liquid. The pressure in zone B is just
below the bubble point and the volume of the evolved gas is too small to allow its
mobilization. In zone C, the evolved gas flows towards the producer, but segregates from
the oil due to gravity and surface forces. In the wellbore, the two phases are considered to
flow together due to the dominant mixing.

Figure 2. Mechanism of a dissolved gas (solution gas) drive reservoir

A typical producing history of a dissolved-gas drive reservoir under primary producing

conditions is shown in Figure 3. As can be seen, the reservoir pressure will initially
decline sharply above bubble-point because of the low compressibility of the reservoir
system but the decline will be slowed down the gas starts to evolve within the reservoir.
On the other hand, the instantaneous or producing gas-oil ratio is constant and equal to
initial solution gas-oil ratio of the reservoir oil above bubble point pressure. At the initial
stage of solution-gas drive (below bubble-point pressure) there is decline in producing
gas-oil ratio owing to the fact that the initial gas which comes out of solution is immobile
and therefore oil entering the wellbore has less solution gas than the initial solution gas.
As the pressure further reduces the released gas becomes mobile and moves at a velocity
greater than its associated oil due to the relative permeability effect. The net effect of
mobile free gas in the reservoir is that the producing gas-oil ratio increases rapidly.

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 Figure 3. Schematic of production history of a dissolved-gas drive reservoir

In some reservoirs, not all gas is dissolved in the oil. Instead, it forms a cap on top of the
oil. A reservoir that has a gas cap will also have gas-cap drive. When the wellbore opens
an escape route for the oil in the reservoir, the pressure of the compressed natural gas in
the gas cap pushes the oil into it. The gas-cap provides the major source of energy but
there is also the expansion of oil and its dissolved gas and the gas coming out of solution.
The oil expansion term is very low and within the errors in calculating the main energy
sources. The pressure of a gas-cap drive depletes more slowly than a dissolved-gas drive.
From 21 to 40 percent of the oil in the reservoir may flow out before a gas-cap drive fails
(Figure 4).

Figure 4. Mechanism of a gas-cap drive reservoir

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Water drive reservoirs: A water drive reservoir is one in which the hydrocarbons are in
contact with a large volume of water bearing formation (aquifer). There are two types of
water drive reservoirs. The first type is the one where the driving energy comes primarily
from the expansion of water as the reservoir is produced (Figure 4). The key issue in this
type of water drive reservoir is the size and the mobility of water of the supporting
aquifer relative to the size of hydrocarbon reservoir.

Water drive may also be a result of artesian flow from an outcrop of the reservoir
formation (Figure 5). In this situation either surface water or seawater feeds into the
outcrop and replenishes the water as it moves into the reservoir to replace the oil.

Water drive is the most efficient natural drive. Sometimes 50 percent or more of the oil in
the reservoir will flow out due only to water drive

Figure 4. Mechanism of a water drive reservoir

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.
Figure 5. Reservoir having artesian a water drive

Compaction Drive: Although not a common drive energy, the characteristics of

compaction drive can be dramatic. Compaction drive occurs when the hydrocarbon
formation is compacted as a result of the increase in the net overburden stress as the
reservoir pore pressure is reduced during production. For example a shallow sand deposit
which has not reached its minimum porosity level due to consolidation can consolidate
further as the net overburden stresses increase as fluids are withdrawn.

Figure 6. Compaction drive

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Gravity drainage: The least common type of reservoir drive is gravity drainage. The
force of gravity is, of course, always at work in a reservoir. Usually, gravity causes oil to
migrate upward, until it runs into an impenetrable formation, by pulling the water down
beneath it. This happens because water is heavier than oil.

Gravity drainage is where the relative density forces associated with the fluids cause the
fluids, the oil, to drain down towards the production well. The tendency for the gas to
migrate up and the oil to drain down clearly will be influenced by the rate of flow of
fluids as indicated by their relative permeabilities. Gravity drainage is generally
associated with the later stages of drive for reservoirs where other drive mechanisms have
been the more dominant energy in earlier years. Gravity drainage can be significant and
effective in steeply dipping reservoirs which are fractured.

More than one drive can work in a reservoir at the same time, and this is called a
combination drive. One type of combination drive occurs when the oil has a gas cap
above it and water below it. Both the gas cap and water drive the oil into the well and up
to the surface. Another combination is dissolved-gas drive plus water drive.

Depending on the type of reservoir and fluids, the recovery factor may not exceed a few
percent of the volumes in place, with an average of 25% for the oil, or, on the contrary, it
could be as high as 75% or more for gas (Figure 7).

Figure 7. Recovery factors for different primary drive mechanisms.