Abstract
The Surfactant-Polymer (SP) process is a type of Chemical Enhanced Oil Recovery (CEOR) method. They are still a challenge for the petroleum oil industry mainly because of the difficulty in designing and forecasting the process behavior on the field scale. Therefore, understanding of the phenomena associated with a CEOR process is of vital importance. For these reasons, this work discusses the benefits of Computed Tomography (CT) uses for the experimental assessment of a SP process. The research includes a literature review that allows identifying the main CT usages for petroleum engineering and a discussion concerning the effectiveness of mathematic expressions proposed for the tomography images treatment of two-phase flow displacement. The conducted experimental methodology can be reproduced to assess the benefits of any chemical Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) process with CT. Thus, this paper assesses the conventional waterflooding (WF) and SP flooding as secondary and tertiary oil recovery methods. The developed study allowed us to evaluate through CT images the porosity and the saturation profiles along the rock sample. Also, CT processed data enabled checking the volumetric material balance and determine the oil Recovery Factor (RF). The doubled checked SP data showed an RF increase of 17 and 10 percentage points for secondary and tertiary chemical injection schemes respect to conventional waterflooding. Finally, comparative results of the water cut (Wcut) evidenced the mobility ratio improvement and reduction on the remaining oil saturation.
Highlights
Nowadays, the growing global energy demand and the gradual revitalization of the oil prices [1] stimulate the reactivation of mature oil fields
Both rock samples used for the core-flooding tests exhibited thin laminations, we considered that the flow behavior was not disturbed because the laminations were in the same direction as the fluids flooding
It is worth it to notice that the final recovery is the same whether calculated with volumetric material balance and Computed Tomography (CT) saturation monitoring, even with the 2-phases calculations [19, 22, 23] showing that the iododecane separated fraction is produced in the same manner than the oil
Summary
The growing global energy demand and the gradual revitalization of the oil prices [1] stimulate the reactivation of mature oil fields. Detailed visualization of the in-situ fluids dynamics during core-flooding tests is vital to improving the mechanisms description and the proper process design For this reason, several authors have presented results including Computed Tomography (CT). Vinegar and Wellington (1987) [14] presented a review of the principles of CT, explained a method to develop two and three-phase saturation measures based on CT images They highlighted the importance of a correct choice of dopant products (some chemical products with a high atomic number) to be applied to some of the fluids with the purpose of improving the visualization and differentiate fluids during the core flood process. Chakravarthy et al (2004) [23] showed CO2 and WAG flooding experiments in homogenous and fractured rock with in-situ saturation and porosity measurements using CT They presented the experimental process used to develop the tests. The link between the 3D imaging and 2D and 3D numerical simulation opens up a route for the determination of parameters as relative permeabilities and capillary pressure in a much more efficient way [25, 26]
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