Abstract
Foam flooding is a promising technique for achieving mobility control and diverting fluid into low-permeability strata in post-water-flooding reservoirs. However, foam flow is very complicated and is influenced by many factors which have not been studied and explored very rigorously (i.e. permeability, surfactant concentration, foam quality, reservoir temperature, oil saturation, water saturation and seepage velocity). Based on core flooding experiments of foam flowing and blocking rules using two kinds of foaming agents, a novel model of foam flooding considering the influences of the above factors is established and solved using a reservoir simulator which is formulated using the IMPES method in conjunction with a Runge-Kutta method. Then, the validation is performed by core flooding experiments in both the absence and presence of oil. Finally, the simulator is used to investigate the effects of the permeability max-min ratio, ratio of vertical to horizontal permeability, gas-liquid ratio, depositional sequence, foaming agent concentration, and reservoir temperature.
Highlights
Foam flooding is an EOR (Enhance Oil Recovery) technique taking foam as the displacing fluid
Foam strength, which is influenced by permeability, surfactant concentration, foam quality, reservoir temperature and oil saturation, affects the foam mobility, which is evaluated by the foam resistance factor
We found that the resistance factor first increases and decreases as the foam quality increases, and the break point is at about 80%
Summary
Foam flooding is an EOR (Enhance Oil Recovery) technique taking foam as the displacing fluid. The mobility of the gas phase is considered as a whole to test and be measured by the resistance factor This method includes increasing the viscosity of the displacing phase as well as decreasing the gas relative permeability, avoids repeated tests, and takes into account the effects of these two mechanisms. A foam resistance factor model derived from our coreflood experiments using two kinds of foam agents is used to represent foam strength features [20] The advantages of this approach reflect the competing goals of simplicity and completeness; the model is not able to describe slow generation or destruction processes thoroughly, considering the influence of flow velocity on foam mobility
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