The effects of chemical composition of fines and nanoparticles on inhibition of formation damage caused by fines migration: Insights through a simplex-centroid mixture design of experiments

Abstract

Fines migration in the reservoir can leads to damage associated with the mobilization of particles and their posterior accumulation in throat pores, producing obstructions in the flow of fluids, resulting in a decrease of reservoir permeability. An emergent alternative to solve this issue is the use of nanoparticles/nanofluids due to their physicochemical properties that can favor the trapping capacity of fines. Hence, this experimental work aims to evaluate the chemical nature effect of different fines and their respective interaction with three kinds of nanoparticles used in specialized literature for formation damage. In this work was emulated experimentally the retention phenomena through a packed sand bed treated with the different nanofluids and then assessed with the suspension of the fines. The sand beds were prepared with Ottawa sand in two ways: water-wet and sand restored to reservoir wettability (oil-wet). The sand beds were soaked with the specific nanofluids which were with deionized water as carrier fluid for the nanoparticles of iron, silica, and alumina at a dosage of 0.01% in a mass fraction respectively. The suspension of fines was constituted by quartz, kaolinite, illite, at a dosage of 0.2 wt%; the chemical nature was based on an average composition of a Colombian field. The Adams-Bohart, Thomas, and Wolborska models were used for describing the results of breakthrough curves. The beds treated with alumina nanoparticles at 0.01 wt% presented a higher capacity to retain and stabilize the Kaolinite fines, increasing the retention capacity up to 50%. The results agree with the total energy interaction of the fines-nanoparticles system reported for alumina nanofluids. Additionally, critical rate tests at reservoir conditions were performed, obtaining successful results by the increasing of critical rate by more than 50% for water and oil flow velocities in comparison to the untreated system. In this sense, this work presents a comprehensive analysis of selectivity of fines-nanoparticles couples through the design of the optimized experiment, focused on selecting select the best nanofluid treatment for the problem of fines migration.