Application of Gas Injection and Recycling to Enhance Condensate Recovery

Condensate loss is one of the major challenges in the gas condensate reservoirs. It results in a reduction of gas permeability and gas productivity. Different methods have been proposed to mitigate the condensate dropout and increase gas and condensate productivity. One of these techniques is gas recycling. Moreover, dry gases such as methane, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide are good candidates for this purpose. The authors investigate the effect of gas recycling and gas injection on an Iranian gas condensate reservoir. First, a literature review of the subject matter was carried out, followed by an introduction of the field. Afterward, steps performed for construction of dynamic model were described. Then, specified production scenario for development plan of the field was presented. A sensitivity analysis was carried out to determine the optimum number of additional wells to meet the target rate of the field. Consequently, injection scenarios including gas recycling, methane injection, nitrogen injection, and CO₂ injection at different injection rates were studied. Results indicated that nitrogen injection and gas recycling can improve recovery factor and plateau time rather than other cases. At high injection rates, gas recycling showed the highest condensate recovery (47%) among these scenarios.