RE: Garrym14 May 2018 01:38
From older and wiser on HC
''Whilst agreeing with most of this post the last paragraph needs examination. It appears to be based on a conventional oil trap scenario, where water lays at the bottom which is overlain by oil with a trapped gas cap on top, all separated out over the eons by the difference in their densities. This is typical of oil production in highly permeable reservoir sands, where separation can physically occur.
In unconventional the oil, gas and water are so tightly held by relatively impermiable shale that they are still in the spot they were first created, no density driven seperation occurs. So held in an evenly distributed mixture of oil and gas with associated water trapped within the entire reservoir.
When Paul Basinski set out to find this reservoir he was seaching specifically for unconventional volitile oil. In the reservoir it exists as a gas containing a significant percentage of methane which has disolved and carries the higher fractions of oil within it. Technically it is described as a supercritcal fluid, in this form it has the properties of both a gas and a liquid. Within the reservoir it can diffuse through rock as a gas would.
When this field produces it will flow this gas to the production tubing, the oil will seperate out of the gas as the temperature drops below its critical point.
As @88Easy points out, when in production the remaining gas (methane) will be surplus and available for use as gas lift if required for further field development. Just take it off the three phase separator (oil, water,gas) compress it and flow back to the gas lift injection point in the production tubing.''
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