Exergy based assessment for decarbonization of CO2 foam flooding enhanced oil recovery process and energy transition with hydrogen

Abstract

Water Flooding (WF) and CO2 Foam Flooding EOR (CFF) processes are exergy intensive and CO2 emissive in nature. Hence, the objective of this work is to investigate the ways to attain decarbonization and to evaluate hydrogen requirement for attaining energy transition during WF and CFF processes under different operational conditions. This was performed by using exergy-based evaluation metrics (i.e., Exergy-Return on Exergy-Investment (ERoEI), carbon emissions and hydrogen intensity). It was found that CFF process was 1.69 times more exergy intensive than WF process. Further, for every barrel of oil produced, WF process had net-CO2 emission of 5.18 kg, while CFF process had net-CO2 sequestration of 814.5 kg. Moreover, during CFF process, reducing the surfactant concentration from 2.5 wt% to 0.5 wt% had correspondingly decreased CO2 emissions from 70% to 31%. Further, to attain energy transition during production operations, it was evaluated that WF process requires 1.7 times more hydrogen than CFF process.