(80b) CO2 Recovery Options at Enhanced Oil Recovery Facilities

The lifetime and production rate of oil extraction from oil fields can be enhanced through the injection of CO₂. This combined oil extraction and CO₂ injection process is referred to as enhance oil recovery (EOR) and it is now common practice to attempt to increase oil production in this way. However, there remain a number of important open questions concerning where to obtain the CO₂ used for injection and how to deal with the mixture of gases (CO₂ and various hydrocarbons) which are extracted together with the oil.

In this work different technologies for the recovery and re-injection of CO₂ are considered. This has the advantage that the CO₂ is partly recycled saving on CO₂ purchase costs and also eliminating a significant amount of CO₂ emissions which might otherwise we released to the atmosphere. The technologies under consideration include distillation, chemical absorption and physical adsorption in addition to consideration of dehydration units for removal of water. These three processes for CO₂ recovery have different characteristics and different benefits and limitations. Hence, we have analysed different configurations combining these technologies to overcome some of the limitations of the individual processes. Each of the processes considered and the resulting combinations of equipment are simulated using the process simulator Unisim^®. In this way the performance of the recovery configurations are evaluated to determine the CO₂ removal efficiency and to identify solutions which provide cost-effective and energy efficient CO₂ recovery in EOR systems.

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by “The development of CO₂ geological storage technologies through 1,000 ton CO₂-EOR pilot test” of the Korea Institute of Energy Technology Evaluation and Planning (KETEP) grant funded by the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy (MOTIE) (No. 2012T100201728).