CATEGORY: HEAVY CRUDE
SPE Heavy Oil Conference Canada, 12-14 June
2012, Calgary, Alberta, Canada
Errors
and Repeatability in VSARA Analysis of Heavy Oils
Wenhui Wu, Milad Saidian, Stuti Gaur, and Manika Prasad, Colorado
School of Mines
Abstract
Increasing demands for world energy resources have accelerated the development
of of heavy oil reservoirs. The recovery
of heavy oils remains challenging due to
variations in their viscosity.
SARA
fractions are a common method to report heavy oil compositions. However, they can have over 20 % errors. Authors
discuss potential error sources and establish a best-practice methodology to
reduce the errors, resulting in a modified SARA method (VSARA) to determine the
composition of heavy oil.
Experimental results show that the evaporative components of heavy
oils, Volatile (V) fractions, are a major source of error in SARA fraction
estimates. By tracking weight changes at every step of the SARA fractionation,
errors are greatly reduced. Based on the comparison between SARA and VSARA
results, VSARA fractions have a significantly lower error (within a 5% range)
than SARA fractions alone.
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