Abstract
Foam implementation for carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) can greatly improve CO2 mobility control, resulting in enhanced hydrocarbon production and carbon storage capacity. The use of nanoparticles (NP) to create robust foam structures has recently gained attention. Local foam generation and coalescence dynamics can be described by mathematical models. Here we address knowledge gaps for NP foam in porous media by tracking the bubble density (nf) of NP foam data spatially and temporally using an established surfactant (SF) population-balance model. We suggest a reduced shear-thinning effect, compared to SF, to accurately model NP CO2 foam flow in both the high- and low-quality regime. A NP foam rheological transition appeared at gas fraction fg = 0.85. The nf parameter increased linearly with distance from inlet for NP foam, with reduced CO2 mobility and improved displacement efficiency compared to co-injections of water and CO2.
Highlights
Carbon geo-sequestration can benefit from improved CO2 mobility control during fluid displacements and flow in porous media
Dynamic properties of CO2 foam stabilized with nanoparticles (NP)
The population-balance model matched experimental data of NP foam effective viscosity over a range of gas fractions, by reducing the shear-thinning effect commonly used for SF foam
Summary
Carbon geo-sequestration can benefit from improved CO2 mobility control during fluid displacements and flow in porous media. Foam is created by leave-behind, lamellae division and snap-off mechanisms, and the stability of foam in porous media is limited by capillary pressures (Khatib et al, 1988). Flowing SF foam is frequently reported to exhibit a shear-thinning behavior (Hirasaki and Lawson, 1985; Khatib et al, 1988; Marsden and Khan, 1966; Heller and Kuntamukkula, 1987; Falls et al, 2007; Fernø et al, 2016), explained by bubbles slipping on the pore wall and against each other. This paper expands the application of an established population-balance model by including NP CO2 foam data to improve characterization of dynamic bubble densities containing nanoparticles in the pore network. We characterized NP foam properties and directly compared the results with a baseline (no foaming agent) and a SF foam flood
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