Abstract
Chemical Enhanced Oil Recovery (cEOR) processes comprise a number of techniques whichmodify the rock/fluid properties in order to mobilize the remaining oil. Among these, surfactantflooding is one of the most used and well-known processes; it is mainly used to decrease the interfacialenergy between the phases and thus lowering the residual oil saturation. A novel two-dimensionalflooding simulator is presented for a four-component (water, petroleum, surfactant, salt), two-phase(aqueous, oleous) model in porous media. The system is then solved using a second-order finitedifference method with the IMPEC (IMplicit Pressure and Explicit Concentration) scheme. The oilrecovery efficiency evidenced a strong dependency on the chemical component properties and itsphase behaviour. In order to accurately model the latter, the simulator uses and improves a simplifiedternary diagram, introducing the dependence of the partition coefficient on the salt concentration.Results showed that the surfactant partitioning between the phases is the most important parameterduring the EOR process. Moreover, the presence of salt affects this partitioning coefficient, modifyingconsiderably the sweeping efficiency. Therefore, the control of the salinity in the injection water isdeemed fundamental for the success of EOR operations with surfactants.
Highlights
Oil is and has been for the last century the main energy source, and the economy on a global scale still depends largely on it [1,2,3,4]
The objective in this paper is to present the numerical simulation of surfactant EOR flooding
It is noteworthy that these components can be mixtures of a number of pure components, since for instance, petroleum is a mixture of many hydrocarbons, water may contain dissolved monovalent and divalent salts, and the surfactant is composed by a number of different molecules [3,8,16]
Summary
Oil is and has been for the last century the main energy source, and the economy on a global scale still depends largely on it [1,2,3,4]. Additional production techniques, or Enhanced Oil Recovery processes, target the remaining oil still trapped [8]. The cEOR techniques are one of the most used for low and medium viscosity crude oils and they can be employed in a wide range of rock formations. Another important advantage of cEOR processes is that the chemicals to be used as sweeping agents can be synthesized or improved based on the desired characteristics for determined crude oils, rock formations and porous media conditions in general, optimizing the overall process and increasing the operational life of the reservoir
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