Surfactant flooding in oil-wet micromodels with high permeability fractures

Mejía, Lucas; Tagavifar, Mohsen; Xu, Ke; Mejia, Miguel; Du, Yujing; Balhoff, Matthew T.

doi:10.1016/j.fuel.2018.12.076

Cited by 72 publications

(32 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…Chemical injection methods are mostly known for the way of producing residual oil after water flooding. These methods have been used for decreasing the interfacial tension, raising the brine viscosity as a mobility control, and increasing sweep efficiency in tertiary recovery (Taber et al, 1997;Shandrygin and Lutfullin, 2008;Rai et al, 2015;Davarpanah, 2018;Mejia et al, 2019). The wettability of an oil reservoir affects the fluids flow displacement and its location in the porous media during the production, and it is a crucial parameter in oil recovery processes (Anderson, 1986;Zhang et al, 2012;Bahaloo Horeh et al, 2019;Emadi et al, 2019;Mofrad and Saeedi Dehaghani, 2020;.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Implications of anionic and natural surfactants to measure wettability alteration in EOR processes

Esfandyari

Shadizadeh

Esmaeilzadeh

et al. 2020

Fuel

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Minerals surface properties have played a substantial to predict the rock mineralogy and chemical materials interactions, especially in chemical flooding (e.g., polymers, surfactant). In this paper, two different surfactants; nonionic surfactant (Zizyphus Spina Christi) and anionic surfactant (henceforth; SDBS) were used to experimentally investigate the minerals of reservoir rocks especially carbonate reservoirs and measure wettability changes accordingly.The contact angle evaluations have depicted that utilized surfactants change the wettability of pellet surfaces of calcite, dolomite, quartz, and anhydrite to neutral-wet or slightly water-wet.As it was observed, SDBS provided the maximum wettability changes for quartz surface.Moreover, the Zizyphus Spina Christi and SDBS have provided efficient performances on the decrease of wettability changes and residual oil saturation in dolomite core and quartz core, respectively. According to the results of this study, the oil recovery factor with anionic SDBS surfactant for calcite, dolomite, and quartz plugs are 66%, 41%, and 93%, respectively. This increase is more visualized for quartz cores that indicated the compatibility of this surfactant with quartz core samples.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Implications of anionic and natural surfactants to measure wettability alteration in EOR processes

Esfandyari

Shadizadeh

Esmaeilzadeh

et al. 2020

Fuel

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“…An optical system comprising of microscope, eternal light source, camera and imaging software was used by [14]. A normal, a refraction microscope Accu-Scope EXI-310 [16] or Nikon Eclipse TI-FL inverted microscope can be used. Micromodel was placed above objective lense, range of objective lenses 2×, 10, and 20× are used for zooming in or out.…”

Section: Optical System and Image Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The images get by optical system was interpreted by using Software such as Texas, LabView 2011 National Instruments, MATLAB Conn [17], Nikon NIS Elements imaging software [14] and GIMP open source imaging software [17] and ImageJ [16] can be used.…”

Section: Optical System and Image Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

A review study on micro fluid chips for enhancing the oil recovery by injecting the chemical floods

et al. 2020

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Surfactant and polymer flooding are the vital techniques used in petroleum industry to enhance the oil recovery. Development and advancement in such techniques has occurred time by time to overcome the challenges of oil and gas recovery. However, micro fluid chips and its development provide a new way to understand the real time behavior of fluid flow in porous media. The essence of this study has been achieved by collecting the information from literature studies and sorted the useful information to organize the pattern of micromodels chip revolution. In this study, first precise review is conducted by the innovations of micromodel chips into timescale from 1952 till date. Second, advancement in micromodel chip technology is included based on different periods of time where micromodel chips have evolved from chip design to nano scale visualization of chips. Third, some recommendations are proposed based on evolution of micromodel chip technology that it not only requires less time but also minimizing the massive experimental setup and complications. The overall finding of this research propose that in current times some microfluidic reforms made recently has played versatile role in improving injection chemical selection and similar improvements are expected to be developed in near future.

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“…Microfluidics is also an effective screening tool for petroleum applications (Ma et al, 2012; Xu et al, 2015). However, microfluidics studies generally have focused on geometries containing an intact (not fractured) porous matrix or a porous matrix with a single connected fracture (Er et al, 2010; Mejia et al, 2019; Wan et al, 1996), where the impact of fracture connectivity on flow was not systematically investigated. The two dimensionality of micromodels may limit their quantitative discoveries to rocks with uniform geometries in the vertical direction or thin geological layers.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Microfluidic Diagnostics of the Impact of Local Microfracture Connectivity on Hydrocarbon Recovery Following Water Injection

Mehmani

et al. 2020

Water Resources Research

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Microfractures originate in hydrocarbon reservoirs and groundwater aquifers either in the form of pore‐scale authigenic apertures or secondary openings during well stimulation. Microfractures are often difficult to detect and can act as an invisible impediment when predicting hydrocarbon recovery. We use microfluidics to identify the flow conditions at which microfracture connectivity with macrofractures becomes impactful. The analysis focuses on fluid displacements at unfavorable mobility ratios, which are difficult to capture with high‐order numerical methods. Two configurations of microfracture type with the porous matrix, either dead‐end (only connected to one macrofracture) or connecting two macrofractures, were investigated as case examples for both water and oil‐wet conditions. Our findings confirm that improvements in hydrocarbon recovery are not universal due to the presence of microfractures but rather are a function of capillary number, wettability, and microfracture connectivity. We find that, regardless of wettability, a capillary number threshold for a connected microfractured system exists beyond which the effects of microfractures on recovery, fluid dendrite morphology, and oil ganglia number diminish considerably. However, substantial geometry‐dependent differences in recovery are observed below this threshold. A connected microfracture generally decreases hydrocarbon recovery and suppresses coalescence of viscous fingering dendrites regardless of wettability. In contrast, a dead‐end microfracture causes wettability‐dependent effects with (1) minimal impact on hydrocarbon recovery at water‐wet conditions and (2) both decreasing and increasing recovery effects at oil‐wet conditions. Furthermore, dead‐end microfractures become somewhat impactful to the divergence of viscous dendrites when capillary number increases but are overall ineffective to the trapped ganglia numbers.

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Surfactant flooding in oil-wet micromodels with high permeability fractures

Cited by 72 publications

References 30 publications

Implications of anionic and natural surfactants to measure wettability alteration in EOR processes

Implications of anionic and natural surfactants to measure wettability alteration in EOR processes

A review study on micro fluid chips for enhancing the oil recovery by injecting the chemical floods

Microfluidic Diagnostics of the Impact of Local Microfracture Connectivity on Hydrocarbon Recovery Following Water Injection

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