Study of thermal efficiency in heavy oil reservoirs submitted to steam injection by using numerical simulation

Abstract In the steam injection applied to heavy oil recovery, just a fraction of the supplied heat can effectively heat the reservoir. To account this effect, it is possible calculating the fraction of the remaining heat, known as the reservoir’s thermal efficiency. This paper presents a comparative study of the thermal efficiency calculation, obtained from a numerical simulator and analytic models proposed by Marx and Langenheim (1959), by using reservoir parameters and operational parameters of steam injection. Among the obtained results, it was verified similarity between the analytic and numeric models, before the steam breakthrough. However, after the breakthrough, the thermal efficiency presented lower values for the numerical model, because the analytic model does not consider heat losses for producer wells, while that other model considers it.