Enhancing Oil Recovery with Nanoparticle-Assisted CO2 Foam in a Carbonate Reservoir

Abstract

Summary This work presents the use of an advanced technique such as high-pressure microscopy (HPM) to examine the stability of CO2 foams at reservoir conditions in the presence and absence of nanoparticles. Furthermore, core flooding studies were performed to investigate their effect on oil displacement and mobility control in core samples from a producing carbonate oil formation in Volga-Ural region in Russia. Our results indicated that foams generated at 80% quality were more stable than foams generated at 50% quality because the bubble size was significantly smaller while bubble count was higher. In the core flooding experiments, the results showed that nanoparticle-stabilized CO2 foam helped to improve oil displacement efficiency from the porous media. Oil recovery factors were 37.7% to 66.6% in the real core by injecting nanoparticle-stabilized foam. This can be attributed to the enhanced viscosity of the propagating phase during the injection of foam, which helped to eliminate the gas breakthrough that was observed during the injection of CO2.