Waterflooding of Surfactant and Polymer Solutions in a Porous Media Micromodel

Creation of a Hydrodynamic Digital Model of a Laboratory Core Experiment of Surfactant Polymer Impact on Oil Recovery, in Order to Determine Parameters for Further Full-Scale Simulation

The work aimed to solve the problem of determining, validating, and transferring model parameters of flooding using chemical enhanced oil recovery (EOR) from a core experiment to a full-scale hydrodynamic model. For this purpose, a digital hydrodynamic model describing the process of oil displacement by the surfactant and polymer solution on the core is created and the digital model is matched to achieve convergence with the historical data. This approach allows the uncertainties associated with the limited number of experiments to be removed to fully describe the parameters of the chemical surfactant polymer flooding model and form a database that could subsequently be replicated at various field sites, having the composition of reservoir fluids and distribution of rock composition in the core material as the basis. Besides, the digital model allows for verification of physical and chemical properties of surfactants and polymers, values of the adsorption of chemical agents on rocks, and the behavior of relative permeability in the hydrodynamic model of EOR before making predictions on the full-scale model and to improve the quality of forecast cases.

Pore Scale Visualization of Drainage in 3D Porous Media by Confocal Microscopy

We visualize the dynamics of immiscible displacement of a high viscosity wetting phase by a low viscosity non-wetting phase in a three-dimensional (3D) glass bead packing using confocal microscopy. Both phases were doped with two different fluorescent dyes, which enabled visualization of both phases simultaneously and quantification of the phase volumes without the need of image subtraction operations. The transient results show details of the displacement process and how pores are invaded by the non-wetting displacing phase. The static images at the end of the displacement process reveal how the trapped ganglia volume and morphology change with capillary number. The wetting phase is trapped as pendular rings spanning one to multiple pore necks. Details of the pore scale flow of oil wet media revealed with the experimental methods presented here can lead to better fundamental understanding of the physical processes and optimized enhanced oil recovery methods, CO₂ sequestration and aquifer remediation.

Colloids and Interfaces in Oil Recovery

The role of surface and colloid chemistry in the petroleum industry is of great importance to the many current and future challenges confronting this sector [...]