Comparison of multiphase flow models against viscous oil data

Authors: Angela De Leebeeck, Raju Aryal, Tayo Kazeem Awolola, Kristian Holms
Affiliation: Production Performance Services, FMC Technologies, Asker, Norway.

Abstract
About 15% of known oil reserves are considered heavy as in having high viscosities
and densities. Heavy oil fields are more challenging economically due to low
recovery rates, low product price and limited experience in the industry.
Development of such fields also tends to be conservative due to uncertainty in
modeling tools when applied to viscous oils. Therefore it is important to validate the
models against viscous oil experiments that are available. The objective of this
paper is to compare multiphase flow models against experimental and field data on
viscous oils.
The models in FlowManager have been used for online simulations since 1995 and
have been refined based on extended use on more than 700 wells and 40 fields. In
this work it is shown that the models compare well with data from recent multiphase
steady pipe flow experiments using two different high viscosity oils and data from a
field.