Although air injection process has been a proven low-cost EOR technique for tight high-temperature light-oil reservoirs elsewhere, there has not been any Australian field application even though several reservoirs appear to meet the screening criteria for the process. Moreover, air injection could be a more attractive alternative for reservoirs that are amenable to hydrocarbon gas processes, thus freeing "cleaner and greener" gases for use for energy resource. Moreover, unlike most EOR processes, the air injection process does not require water, a scarce natural resource in Australia. In this screening stud, y Kenmore oilfield in Eromanga Basin operated by Beach Petroleum has been chosen as the candidate oil. Kenmore reservoir is a 1395-m deep tight (4.4mD) light-oil (48.7°API) reservoir at 92°C. As the process feasibility depends primarily on the oxidation characteristics of the oil and its ability to sustain the ignition front during the process, the first step undertaken is the thermogravimetric and calorimetric characterization of Kenmore oil to (i) identify the temperature range over which the oil reacts with oxygen, (ii) examine the oxidation behavior within the temperature range identified, and (iii) evaluate the mass loss characteristics during the oxidation. A series of thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) and pressurized differential scanning calorimetric (DSC) tests were conducted on Kenmore oil. Tests showed two distinct exothermic reactivity regions of temperatures within 200–340ºC and 360–450ºC, with an 85–95% mass loss when the temperature reached 450ºC. Endothermic reactions are attributed to evaporation, distillation, and thermolysis; whereas exothermic reactions are due to low temperature oxidation, pyrolysis, and high temperature oxidation. It was observed that at an elevated pressure resulted in accelerated the bond scission reactions, a positive sign as far as the application of the air injection process is concerned; for, it suggests that Kenmore oil has the oxidation potential under high pressure air injection. Introduction Air injection is a promising enhanced oil recovery technique for a low-permeability, high-temperature, and light-oil reservoirs. The feasibility of air injection technique primarily depends on the oxidation characteristics of the candidate reservoir oil and the sustainability of the ignition front during the course of the project. A number of studies on air injection (Moore et al., 2002; Sarma et al., 2002) have noted that the energy required for an air injection process to work comes from and within the reservoir itself with a typical 5–10% consumption of the reservoir-oil during oxidation. The first field pilot of air injection began in 1963 on Sloss Field in Nebraska (Parrish et al., 1974) and this process was first commercially introduced as a secondary recovery technique in the north and south Dakota portions of the Williston basin, (USA), which was started in 1979 and continues to be a technical and economic success (Fassihi et al., 1996; Kumar et al., 2007; Kumar et al., 2008). Air injection in the Buffalo field reported to recovered a total of 17.2 million barrels of incremental oil an equivalent of 9.4 percent of the OOIP (Gutierrez et al., 2008).
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