SPE 68170
Investigation of Revaporization of Retrograde Condensate
Shi Li, Xitan Zheng, Zhijian Dai, Kai Luo, Gang Chen, Ning Liu, Research Institute of Petroleum Exploration and
Development
Copyright 2001, Society of Petroleum Engineers Inc.
This paper was prepared for presentation at the 2001 SPE Middle East Oil Show held in
Bahrain, 17–20 March 2001.
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Abstract
A series of experiments have been carried out in order to
quantitatively investigate the revaporization efficiency of
retrograde condensate by dry gas injection. The experiment
includes three main parts: (1) gas injection below the dew
point pressure in the PVT cell, (2) gas injection above and (3)
below the dew point pressure in a long-core flooding
apparatus. Instead of the simple synthetic fluid and the packed
core systems usually used in the previous literature, an actual
gas condensate fluid and an approximately one meter long-
core were employed here. The tests with long-core apparatus
show that more condensate above the dew point is recovered
than below the dewpoint, forcefully justifying the traditional
argument that the full pressure maintenance is superior to the
partial pressure maintenance according to the condensate
recovery. An interesting discovery is that dry gas can
effectively revaporize not only the intermediate but also the
heavy hydrocarbons (i.e., C20+), which is in contrary with the
common belief that the heavy hydrocarbon cannot be
revaporized by dry gas.
Introduction
In the past few years, many high temperature high pressure
rich gas condensate reservoirs and volatile oil reservoirs have
been delineated in West China, especially in the Tarim Basin.
Since retrograde condensation will lead to a great amount of
liquid dropout and thus a large economical loss, the gas
injection is usually applied to maintain the reservoir pressure
above the saturation pressure. However, some of these gas
condensate/volatile oil reservoirs have a rather high saturation
pressure. Therefore the full pressure maintenance above the
saturation pressure in these reservoirs will be extremely
expensive. An alternative is to deplete the reservoir to a
certain pressure below the saturation pressure and then start
gas injection to revaporize the liquid condensate in the porous
reservoirs. This may not only lower the investment on
equipment and the operating cost, but also improve the
condensate recovery.
Although many new strategies have been proposed for
exploitation of gas condensate reservoirs1, gas injection2 is still
a widely applied development method. After Standing's3 and
Weinaug & Cordell's4 pioneering studies on the revaporization
of gas condensate, many researchers have pursued this
phenomenon and the possible influence factors5-13, revealing
the mechanism occurred in gas condensate reservoirs in the
course of gas injection. There are various viewpoints and
arguments on the possibility of revaporization, as well as the
mechanism and the extent of revaporization. Weinaug et al.4
believed that condensate can be vaporized completely if the
amount of dry gas injected is enough4. Oxford et al. assumed
that the dry gas injected is in equilibrium with the condensate5.
Smith et al. 7 found that the production rate has little effect on
the equilibrium of fluids in the porous media. Also Sigmund et
al.8 found that carbon dioxide and methane are more effective
in revaporization than nitrogen9-13. But there are still some
conflicting arguments, e.g., Smith et al.7 argued that the
porous media, the water saturation and the core wettability has
little effect on revaporization, while Sigmund et al.8 found that
the decrease in the size of packed particle and the increase in
the saturations of oil and water will enhance the revaporization
rate.
According to the literature review in this report, nearly
all the published experimental studies on revaporization used
simple synthetic fluids like C4, C5, C6, C7 or their mixtures. No
experimental revaporization studies using actual gas
condensate fluid and the actual core were reported in the open
literature. This may partly explain the reason why Standing's
result3 didn't receive much attention it deserved. In this study,
the revaporization process of an actual rich gas condensate
reservoir fluid in an actual core system has been investigated,
which will definitely benefit the exploitation of gas condensate
reservoirs.
Experimental
Apparatus. The long-core flooding apparatus mainly consist
of the flooding system, the long-core holding system, the
2 S. LI, X. ZHENG, Z. DAI, K. LUO, G. CHEN, N. LIU
observation window, the back-pressure valve, the gas/oil
meter and the fluid analysis system. The maximum working
pressure was 70 MPa and the maximum working temperature
was 150 oC.
Principles. In the revaporization experiment, dry gas was
injected to revaporize the liquid condensate generated during
the depletion of a gas condensate sample. The gas and
condensate produced were collected and analyzed regularly to
determine the amount of condensate revaporized.
Fluids. The reservoir fluid was represented by recombining
with the separator gas/oil taken from a gas condensate
reservoir according to the gas oil ratio (GOR) measured in
field. The final composition of recombined fluid is shown in
Fig.1. The reservoir temperature was about 138oC and the
reservoir pressure was 56 MPa. Based on the routine PVT
study, the dew point pressure at the reservoir temperature was
measured at 52 MPa. In constant volume depletion, the
maximum liquid dropout of 19.79 vol% happened at 22 MPa,
indicating a rich gas condensate.
The molar amount of the dry gas injected was composed
of 92% nitrogen+methane, 5% ethane and 3% propane,
respectively.
Cores. The water-wet cores used in the experiment were taken
from the same gas condensate field as the fluid samples. Each
core was manufactured to a 7 cm long column with a diameter
of 3.8 cm.
In the descending order of permeability, 15 cores were
placed from the inlet to the outlet, forming a 103 cm long core
group. The air permeability and porosity for each core is
presented in Fig.2. The pore volume (PV), of the long-core
system saturated with formation water was measured to be
238.47 cm3.
Procedure. The long-core was first pressurized to the
reservoir pressure by nitrogen injection at the reservoir
temperature. The gas condensate fluid was then injected above
the dew point to flood nitrogen out. The oil and gas were
sampled at the outlet of the long-core and analyzed by gas
chromatography. It indicated that the long-core had been
saturated by the gas condensate sample when the analysis
result was the same as the inlet fluid composition.
Gas Injection Experimental Results
Injection in PVT Cell below Dew Point. Before the test in
the long-core apparatus, a preliminary depletion experiment
was performed in PVT cell. The sample was first depleted to
35 MPa to produce liquid condensate, the dry gas was then
injected into the PVT cell at the same pressure. A dramatic
decrease of liquid volume was observed as the dry gas
injection continued, which indicated that the revaporization
was very obvious shown in Fig.3. This was also proved by the
variation of oil produced with the gas injection volume shown
in Fig.4. It can be seen from Fig.4 that not only the
intermediate components but also some heavy components
(C20+) could be vaporized. The recovery factors reached
40.31% at 1 pore volume (PV) gas injection and 53.70% at 2
PV gas injection.
SPE 68170
Long-core Injection Test at Reservoir Pressure. This test
was carried out at the reservoir condition by injecting dry gas
into the long-core saturated with the rich gas condensate. Its
purpose was to investigate the effect of keeping the pressure
simply above the saturation pressure, and compare it with the
effect of gas injection after depletion to a certain pressure. In
this test the long-core was first saturated by the gas condensate
fluid at the reservoir condition, the dry gas was then injected
into the long-core at the rate of 2m/d and the pressure of 56
MPa. The oil and gas produced were measured regularly, and
both oil and gas sample were analyzed using gas
chromatography. The experiment was ended when the gas
injected reached twice pore volume of the long-core.
Fig.5 shows the variation of GOR with the gas injection
volume. When the gas injection was less than 0.7 PV, the
GOR was almost constant and independent of the gas
injection, indicating that it was in the piston-type flooding
stage. As the gas injection increased to greater than 0.7PV but
less than 1.2PV, the GOR was slightly increasing. In this
stage, there existed the combined effects of flooding and
revaporization. When the injected dry gas contacted the
original gas condensate in the long-core, the mass transfer
would enrich the dry gas and at the same time raise the dew
point pressure of the gas condensate. Therefore retrograde
condensation would happen earlier, but the liquid condensate
could be revaporized by the subsequent gas injected. The
increase of GOR in this stage was not obvious. When more
gas was injected and the gas injection was greater than 1.2 PV,
GOR increased rapidly, and rised up to 22x104 cm3/g at 2 PV
gas injection. From the variation of GOR with gas injection
volume, the gas breakthrough was estimated to happen at 0.7
PV gas injection.
Fig.6 presents the variation of cumulative condensate
recovery with the gas injection volume. The cumulative
condensate recovery increased nearly linearly when the gas
injection volume was less than 0.8 PV. This increasing curve
got much flatter when the gas injection volume was greater
than 1.0 PV and become virtually flat at last. The condensate
recovery was 68.28% at 1 PV gas injection and 86.22 at 2 PV
gas injection. These values were lower than the expected,
which might be caused by the retrograde condensation due to
the rise of dew point pressure after dry gas injection. Fig.7
shows the variation of composition and density of produced
oil with the gas injection volume. It can be seen from this
figure that the oil produced contained mainly light and
intermediate components during the early stage, and the
intermediate and heavy during the final stage.
Long-core Injection Test below Dew Point. In this part, gas
injection was carried out when the rich gas condensate fluid
was depleted to a certain pressure and to generate in-situ liquid
condensate.The purpose is to investigate the effect of
revaporization on the condensate recovery. The experimental
method is similar to the above method, the only difference is
that the depletion was performed for a while after the long-
core was saturated by the gas condensate fluid. In our
experiment, the sample was first depleted from 56 MPa to 35
SPE 68170 INVESTIGATION OF REVAPORIZATION OF RETROGRADE CONDENSATE
MPa and then injected dry gas at this pressure. We stopped gas
injection when it reached twice pore volume. The same long-
core and the same fluid sample were used here.
The recovery factors for condensate and natural gas were
12.07% and 21.53%, respectively, when the pressure was
depleted to 35MPa in the long-core.
The variation GOR of the produced oil with gas injection
volume after the depletion to 35MPa was shown in Fig.8.
When the gas injection was less than 0.8 PV, the GOR was
nearly constant and it was in a piston flooding stage. When the
gas injection was greater than 0.8 PV but less than 1.1 PV, the
curve becomes flat, which indicated that the revaporization
was very obvious. As gas injection volume increased, although
vaporization still happened, the amount of revaporized
condensate was relatively small as compared with the gas
injected, therefore the GOR increased obviously. The GOR
increased to 15000 cm3/g at 2 PV gas injection. The gas
injection volume at the breakthrough is estimated to be 0.8
PV.
The cumulative condensate recovery with gas injection
volume is shown in Fig.9. The recovery obtained by the first
depletion to 35MPa was 12.07% prior to gas injection. It can
be seen from Fig.9 that the cumulative recovery increasing
linearly with gas injection volume is between 0~1.1 PV, the
cumulative recovery at 1 PV gas injection was 45.10%. When
the gas injection is greater than 1.1 PV, the cumulative
recovery curve becomes flat with a very slight increasing
tendency. The cumulative recovery at 2 PV gas injection was
61.49%. If more gas was injected after 2 PV, it would continue
to produce some liquid condensate due to revaporization.
In this experiment, the condensate and gas compositions
and the liquid density were measured regularly. The analysis
showed that the liquid density increased after breakthrough.
There were not only intermediate components (lighter than
C15) but also heavy components (C20+) in the produced oil,
and it was shown in the Fig.10 that the content of heavy
components increased with the gas injection volume
increasing. This indicated that the revaporization was very
obvious, not only the intermediate components but also the
heavy components in the condensed oil could be revaporized
by gas injection. In our experiment, the oil produced both in
the early stage and in the final stage were mainly light and
intermediate condensate although the heavy component
content would increase a bit in the final stage.
Comparison of Results. The three gas injection experiments
are summarized in Table 1. It can be seen from the changes of
the composition and the condensate density in long-core tests
that the condensate produced by gas injection above the
dewpoint is heavier than that below the dewpoint. The
cumulative recovery above the dewpoint is higher than that
below the dewpoint at the same gas injection volume, e.g.,
23.18% higher recovery at 1 PV gas injection and 24.73%
higher at 2 PV gas injection, respectively. In addition, the
recovery was higher in the long-core apparatus than in the
PVT cell, which indicates that the porous media may improve
the revaporization.
3
If the cumulative recovery is the only consideration, gas
injection above the saturation pressure will be better.
However, if the high dew point pressure (52 MPa) is
considered, gas injection above the saturation pressure will
require more investment in the early stage, thus a
comprehensive economic evaluation must be made to
determine which gas injection method is better and to what
extent the pressure should be maintained.
Conclusions
(1) The gas injection tests after depletion both in the long-core
apparatus and in PVT cell show that the revaporization of
gas condensate in the reservoir is obvious, the dry gas
injected will vaporize efficiently not only those
intermediate hydrocarbons but also some heavy
hydrocarbons (C20+). For gas condensate reservoirs with
high dew point pressure, it is possible to use gas injection
to vaporize the condensate formed in the depletion.
(2) The cumulative condensate recovery in the long-core test
is higher than that in PVT cell at the same gas injection
volume, which indicates that the porous media may be
helpful to the revaporization process.
(3) The long-core gas injection experiment shows that the oil
produced are heavier above the saturation pressure than
that below the saturation pressure. In the former process,
the oil produced is mainly light and intermediate
components in the early stage and mainly the intermediate
and heavy in the final stage. However, in the latter process,
all the oil produced is mainly light and intermediate
condensate although the heavy component may increase a
bit in the final stage.
(4) During the gas injection at the reservoir pressure, the mass
transfer between the dry gas injected and the original gas
condensate will lead to a rise in dew point pressure and
earlier retrograde condensation, lowering the gas
condensate recovery to some extent.
Acknowledgement
The authors wish to gratefully acknowledge the financial
support for this programme provided by Tarim Oil Field Ltd
and CNPC. The authors would like to thank Research Institute
of Petroleum Exploration and Development for permission to
publish this work.
References
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Alberta, Canada, June 14-18, 1999.
2. Klotz J A. Condensate Production. JPT, May 1953; V(5):
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3. Standing M B, Lindblad E N, Parsons R L. Calculated
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variable permeability. Trans. AIME, 1948; 174: 165-190.
4 S. LI, X. ZHENG, Z. DAI, K. LUO, G. CHEN, N. LIU SPE 68170

4. Weinaug C P, Cordell J C. Revaporization of butane and

pentane from sand. JPT, 1948; 2(11): 457-465.
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m2
hydrocarbons from an unconsolidated sand. Paper

2
10 -3µm
Number 190-G, presented at the Fall Meeting of the 120 40

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(¡ñ ) porosity, %
permeability 10
Petroleum Branch, American Institute of Mining and
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airpermeability,
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hydrocarbons from an unconsolidated sand. JPT, May
1953; V(5): 15-18.
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7. Smith L R, Yarborough L. Equilibrium Revaporization of

air
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condensed liquids by revaporization during dry gas
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in using nitrogen for improved recovery from retrograde
condensate reservoirs. JPT, Feb. 1981; 33(2): 256-262. Fig. 2 Physical Properties of the Cores Used
10. Donohoe C W, Buchanan R D. Economic Evaluation of in Long-Core Flooding Experiments
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20
Table 1 Comparison of the Produced Condensate
Component Gas injection volume, 1PV 　 Gas injection volume, 2PV
at reservoir after in PVT at reservoir after in PVT 0
mole% pressure depletion cell pressure depletion cell 0 .0 0 .5 1 .0 1 .5 2 .0 2 .5 3 .0 3 .5
C5~C10 45.02 64.32 47.84 18.26 31.83 31.83 ga s in je ct io n v o lum e , P V
C11~C15 28.28 24.78 34.32 35.95 47.41 32.64
Fig. 3 Variation of Liquid Dropout with Gas
C16~C19 13.98 6.94 11.89 19.41 15.08 13.01
Injection (at 35 MPa and in PVT Cell)
C20+ 12.72 3.96 5.95 26.38 5.68 8.25
Density
3 0.8104 0.7814 0.7995 0.8393 0.8089 0.8038
(g/cm ) 100
cumulative
68.28 45.1 40.31 　 86.22 61.49 53.7
composition of the oil produced,

recovery(wt%)

100
mole%

10
10 C5-C10
mole %

C11-C15
C16-C19
C20+
1
1
0.0 0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0 2.5 3.0 3.5
gas injection volume, PV
0.1
CO2 N2 C1 C2 C3 iC4 nC4 iC5 nC5 C6 C7+

component Fig. 4 Variation of Composition of the Oil

Produced with Gas Injection
Fig.1 Composition of Gas Condensate (at 35 MPa and in the PVT cell)
SPE 68170 INVESTIGATION OF REVAPORIZATION OF RETROGRADE CONDENSATE 5

25000
100

cumulative condensate recovery

20000
80
GOR, cm 3 /g

15000
60

wt%
10000
40
5000
20

0 0
0.0 0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0 2.5 0.0 0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0 2.5
gas injection volume, PV gas injection volume, PV
Fig. 5 Variation of GOR with Gas Injection Volume
Fig. 6 Variation of Cumulative Condensate
(at 56 MPa)
Recovery with Gas Injection Volume (at 56 MPa)

100
composition of the oil produced,

18000

15000
GOR, c m /g

12000
3
mole%

10 9000

C5-C10 6000
C11-C15
C16-C19 3000
C20+
0
1 0.0 0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0 2.5
0.0 0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0 2.5 gas injection volume, PV
gas injection volume, PV

Fig.7 Variation of Composition of the Oil Fig.8 Variation of GOR with Gas Injection
Produced With Gas Injection Volume (at 35 MPa and in the Long-Core)
(at 56 MPa and in the long-core)
cumulative condensate recovery

70 100
composition of the oi

60
produced , mole%

50
, wt%

40
10
30
20 C5-
10 C10
C11-
0 1 C15
0.0 0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0 2.5 0.0 0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0 2.5
gas injection volume , PV gas injection volume, PV
Fig.9 Variation of Cumulative Condensate Fig.10 Variation of Composition of the Oil
Recovery with Gas Injection Volume Produced with Gas Injection
(at 35 MPa and in the Long-Core) (at 35 MPa and in the Long-Core)