Heating of Oil Well by Hot Water Circulation

TL;DR

This paper develops a mathematical model and numerical methods to analyze hot water circulation as a solution for heating viscous oil wells, aiming to improve oil production rates.

Contribution

It introduces a coupled PDE-Volterra integral model and provides numerical simulations for oil well heating by hot water circulation.

Findings

Model effectively simulates oil well heating process

Numerical methods enable accurate predictions of temperature distribution

Potential to optimize hot water circulation for better oil extraction

Abstract

When highly viscous oil is produced at low temperatures, large pressure drops will significantly decrease production rate. One of possible solutions to this problem is heating of oil well by hot water recycling. We construct and analyze a mathematical model of oil-well heating composed of three linear parabolic PDE coupled with one Volterra integral equation. Further on we construct numerical method for the model and present some simulation results.