Application Of Empirical PVT Correlations Exemplify Significance Of Developing Regional Correlations - A New Approach Available to Purchase

An accurate description of physical properties for crude oils is necessary for solving many of reservoir engineering and surface production operational problems. Ideally, crude oil properties are determined experimentally in the laboratory on actual fluid samples taken from the field under study. However, in the absence of experimentally measured crude oil properties, especially during the prospecting phase, or when only invalid samples are available, one can resort to empirically derived PVT correlations. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate most of the empirically derived PVT correlations found in the literature during the last five decades by applying them to the Egyptian Crude Oils. The PVT measurements of 324 fluid samples covering a wide range of crude oils ranging from heavy to volatile oils have been used in this study. In order to use these correlations properly; special care was given to the limitations of data and nature of parameters used to derive these correlations. This paper concludes that due to regional changes in crude oil compositions, a universal correlation that can be applied to different types of crude oils would be difficult to obtain. Therefore, correlations for a local region, where crude oil properties are expected to be uniform, would be a necessary alternative. The study also derives and test new correlations to predict the fluid properties for Egyptian crudes including bubble point pressure, solution gas-oil-ratio, oil formation volume factor, oil compressibility, oil density, and oil viscosity.Sensitivity analysis indicated that the experimentally determined flash liberation gas-oil-ratio, which corresponds to the producing gas-oil-ratio, is the most correlative parameter with the bubble point pressure. Therefore the separator gas-oil ratio was used in this study as the key parameter for predicting the oil properties.Finally, this study compares the predicted properties from the new correlations and the commonly used empirical correlations by applying them to the experimental database available for Egyptian crude oils. Correlations developed by this study revealed more accurate results than the literature correlations