Modeling of Enhanced Oil Recovery

Abstract

The demand for energy has been increasing exponentially and at present time, this cannot be fulfilled by renewable energy alone. Crude oil has remained one of the major mineral resources for energy. It is difficult for a populated developing country like Nigeria, to keep a balance between the supply and demand of crude oil. In recent years, considerable studies have been conducted to search for efficient technologies for recovering oil from old oil reservoirs since about two-thirds of the oil in the reservoir cannot be recovered by conventional methods. The trapped oil in the reservoir can be recovered by enhanced oil recovery (EOR) methods such as chemical, thermal, gas, and microbial methods. Nanofluid flooding is found to be one of the efficient methods that have gained importance as nanoparticles have been found to alter the rock wettability which helps in oil recovery. It has also been found that the use of modeling to evaluate the performance of any process before conducting any experiments is found to be a more economical and effective practice. Therefore, the present modeling work was carried out to explore the application of nanofluid in EOR using COMSOL Multiphysics.This study investigates the effect of different parameters on EOR such as the addition of nanoparticles (Al2O3) in water, the porosity of the reservoir, and diffusion coefficients of nanofluid on oil saturation in reservoirs. Velocity contours, temperature contours, and oil saturation contours within the reservoir were investigated.