Reservoir screening for EOR potential for the Western North Slope, Alaska

The Western North Slope of Alaska is an oil-rich zone located in the Colville river unit close to the Eastern boundary of National Petroleum Reserve Alaska. With an objective to find better enhanced oil recovery solutions and improve recoveries, four reservoirs from the Western North Slope were screened for different enhanced oil recovery methods to find the most suitable option. Based on the initial screening, gas injection was found to be the preferred method. This was followed by the determination of optimum injection gas compositions for Western North Slope reservoirs and their rank, thereby developing a new ranking methodology for gas flooding projects. The work was accomplished via a combination of two custom developed Excel spreadsheets for the determination of minimum miscibility pressure and enrichment respectively and several numerical experiments carried out using a compositional reservoir simulator, the results of which were applied for parametric ranking of the four Western North Slope reservoirs.