Bubble-growth regime for confined foams: Comparison between N2–CO2/foam and CO2/foam stabilized by silica nanoparticles

Abstract

The use of foam technology in Pre-Salt reservoirs is a potential solution to control gas mobility in highly heterogeneous reservoirs. However, achieving stable CO2-foams under reservoir conditions can be challenging since high solubility in water of supercritical CO2 enhances coarsening and coalescence of bubbles. Coarsening is the evolution of foam structure with time due to gas diffusion between bubbles. In this phenomenon, gas normally diffuses from smaller to larger bubbles, which for confined foam is relevant because this ends up decreasing the number of bubbles in a determined area/volume of the pore space (foam texture). When foam texture coarsens, gas mobility control is impaired, and it can also affect foam rheology. Therefore, it is important to characterize bubble growth kinetics to compare strategies to reduce coarsening and investigate their impact on gas mobility reduction due to foam injection. In a previous work, we reported the use of nanoparticles and a CO2/N2 gas mixture as strategies for improving gas mobility of CO2-foams formed with a zwitterionic surfactant in a micromodel experiment. The present study focuses on quantitatively assessing the bubble growth regime related to coarsening for these two strategies. Indeed, bubble growth is a key parameter for population balance mathematical models that simulate CO2-foams in porous media. Image analysis was used to characterize the foam texture by calculating the bubble density and bubble size distribution of the foam confined in dead-end pores areas of the micromodel. Our results showed that, the number of trapped bubbles was twice as high for the foam formed with the gas mixture compared to those containing nanoparticles, and this higher bubble density was correlated with the higher pressure drop observed for this system, indicating lower gas mobility. The coarsening rates obtained by analyzing the change in trapped bubble area with time of CO2-foam containing nanoparticles (0.25 μm2 s−1) was in the same order of magnitude compared to that obtained by a CO2/N2 gas mixture-foam (0.44 μm2 s−1), under the same high-pressure high-temperature (HPHT) conditions. These results meant that both strategies were able to stabilize the weak foam formed between zwitterionic surfactant and CO2, and that the initial foam texture determined resistance to flow. The semi-automatic algorithm successfully identified the bubbles trapped within the system during the period of analysis, which allowed us not to add dyes that could change interfacial behavior at the water-gas interface. The novel results that evaluate the coarsening rate for CO2-foam under HPHT conditions can positively impact the estimation of foam destruction parameters for population balance models for more representative reservoir conditions of trapped gas. Our findings fill part of the gap in terms of evaluation of coarsening rate under more representative reservoir conditions, improving the understanding of kinetics of foam destruction. This information is relevant for establishing a correct range of the destruction term for populational balance models. Moreover, our results reveal that the type of strategy chosen to delay coarsening can significantly impact gas mobility reduction and that using nanoparticles impacted significantly interfacial properties of the formed foam.