Abstract
Conventional in-situ upgrading techniques use electric heaters to heat oil shale. However, the efficiency of electrical heating method is very slow which requires preheating more than a year. Most conventional heating technologies focused on converting the oil shale, not shale oil reservoirs. The shale oil matrix is very tight and the pore scale is in micro to nano-meter. In this paper, it has been attempted to inject air into hydraulically fractured horizontal wells to create in-situ combustion of shale oil in ultra-low permeability formations. Heat is introduced into the formation through multistage fractured horizontal wells, which enhances the contact area of exposed kerogen.
The main focus of this paper is to evaluate the technical feasibility of recovering shale oil resources by air injection. It involves the application of hydraulic fracturing technology to enhance the kerogen exposure to oxygen. Heat flows from the fracture into shale oil formation, gradually converting the solid kerogen into mobile oil and gas, which can be produced via fractures to the production wells.
