Numerical simulation of foam displacement impacted by kinetic and equilibrium surfactant adsorption

Abstract

This study explores the effectiveness of foam in reducing gas mobility in porous media impacted by surfactant adsorption in highly heterogeneous porous media. The research focuses on assessing the influence of kinetic and equilibrium adsorption during foam displacement on reservoir sweep efficiency, considering co-injection and SAG (Surfactant Alternating Gas) injection strategies. Including the surfactant on the liquid phase and considering the surfactant adsorption effects fitted by experimental data, the mathematical modeling combines Darcy’s law, fluid phase conservation, surfactant transport equations, and a non-Newtonian foam model in local equilibrium. The simulations utilize FOSSIL (FOam diSplacement SImuLator), an in-house software composed of a stable and conservative numerical algorithm with reduced numerical diffusion. These properties are achieved by combining a hybrid mixed finite element method to solve the Darcy system with a central-upwind finite volume scheme to approximate the transport equations and adopting an implicit adaptive method in time. The results reveal that while omitting adsorption phenomena enhances sweep efficiency due to reduced surfactant loss, differences between equilibrium and kinetic adsorption models are minor (up to 0.3% in production). Consequently, these results suggest using simple adsorption models, such as equilibrium isotherms, rather than more complex models, such as kinetics. Additionally, the SAG approach outperforms co-injection (up to 19% in production), despite the fact that the adsorption is detrimental to both of them, aligning with literature results and previous findings.