A Laboratory Approach on the Hybrid-Enhanced Oil Recovery Techniques with Different Saline Brines in Sandstone Reservoirs

Abstract

As foams are not thermodynamically stable and might be collapsed, foam stability is defined by interfacial properties and bulk solution. In this paper, we investigated foam injection and different salinity brines such as NaCl, CaCl2, KCl, and MgCl2 to measure cumulative oil production. According to the results of this experiment, it is concluded that sequential low-salinity water injections with KCl and foam flooding have provided the highest cumulative oil production in sandstone reservoirs. This issue is related to high wettability changes that had been caused by the KCl. As K+ is a monovalent cation, KCl has the highest wettability changes compared to other saline brines and formation water at 1000 ppm, which is due to the higher wettability changes of potassium (K+) over other saline ions. The interfacial tension for KCl at the lowest value is 1000 ppm and, for MgCl2, has the highest value in this concentration. Moreover, the formation brine, regarding its high value of salty components, had provided lower cumulative oil production before and after foam injection as it had mobilized more in the high permeable zones and, therefore, large volumes of oil would be trapped in the small permeable zones. This was caused by the low wettability alteration of the formation brine. Thereby, formation water flowed in large pores and the oil phase remained in small pores and channels. On the other hand, as foams played a significant role in the mobility control and sweep efficiency, at 2 pore volume, foam increased the pressure drop dramatically after brine injection. Consequently, foam injection after KCl brine injection had the maximum oil recovery factor of 63.14%. MgCl2 and formation brine had 41.21% and 36.51% oil recovery factor.

Implications of Chemical-Thermal enhanced oil recovery methods in shale reservoirs

“…Chemical recovery techniques have always provided efficient results in oil production. The application of foams in the oil recovery from tight reservoirs by increasing mobility control is shown as a novel method to enhance sweep efficiency (Davarpanah & Mirshekari, 2019cY Hu et al, 2020c;Yu et al, 2019). Moreover, the foaming agent, which is always a surfactant that reduces the interfacial tension between oil and water phases, would increase the oil production rate in tight reservoirs (Davarpanah & Mirshekari, 2020b;Sie & Nguyen, 2019, 2020Wei et al, 2018;Y Zhang et al, 2019).…”

Amphoteric and cationic surfactants for enhancing oil recovery from carbonate oil reservoirs

“…The rate of exploitation of different trapped sorts of fossil resources affects common energy requisition [5][6][7][8][9]. Although the high amount of oil is exploited daily, approximately thirty percent of the oil reserves have been produced by natural drive mechanisms of oil recovery techniques [10][11][12][13][14][15].Thus, enhanced oil recovery (EOR) methods can exploit the extra oil [16][17][18][19] because the remaining trapped oil is a huge and charming target for EOR techniques in petroleum industry [20][21][22][23][24].…”

A Laboratory Approach to Measure Carbonate Rocks’ Adsorption Density by Surfactant and Polymer

“…Nowadays, many kinds of research studies have been complimented on the tertiary oil recovery field in order to enhance oil recovery (EOR) and make stable oil production after the primary and secondary oil recovery [1][2][3][4][5][6][7]. e use of a surfactant as a surface-active agent is one of the new techniques for growing oil extraction by changing the wettability of carbonate reservoirs from oil-wet to water-wet [8][9][10][11][12][13].…”