The combination of horizontal well drilling and multistage
hydraulic
fracturing is currently the leading method for developing shale reservoirs.
However, oil recovery from these techniques does not exceed 10%, and
supporting technologies are being sought. The injection of water or
surfactant solutions in huff-n-puff mode is often considered an enhanced
oil recovery option for shales, which can be used alone or in combination
with other technologies, such as CO2 injection. This study
presents experimental and numerical investigations into the huff-n-puff
treatment of low-permeability shale cores using water-based compositions.
Additionally, an attempt was made to displace oil by applying a nanofluid
booster. Computational tomography was used as one of the methods to
determine the oil recovery factor. Two core flooding tests with different
designs and injection fluids were conducted. The first experiment
involved brine filtration in one direction, followed by nanofluid
injection. Second core flooding/huff-n-puff test implied injection
of a 0.5 wt % surfactant solution. The results showed that the oil
recovery factor achieved using brine was approximately 50% and decreased
after nanofluid injection until 31%. Besides that, there was no significant
effect from the use of the surfactant. At the same time, critical
issues were observed regarding a decrease in core permeability. A
numerical simulation of the second experiment was performed to restore
the relative phase permeability (RPP) in the surfactant–oil
system and to study the dependency of the capillary number logarithm
on the miscibility coefficient. The simulation showed a good convergence
in terms of the recovery factor values, with an error of ∼1.5%.
The article describes the development aimed at a comprehensive study for enhanced oil recovery methods (EOR) of the Bazhenov shale oil formation. Potentially effective technologies for low-permeable reservoirs are under consideration: injection of associated petroleum gas in the mode of miscible displacement to recover light oil; injection of the surfactants water solutions, to separate sorbed hydrocarbons from the rock and change core wettability; and heating technologies to convert solid hydrocarbons into liquid and gaseous, and recover.
The project explore potentially effective EOR technologies and their influence on the various types of hydrocarbons of the shale Bazhenov formation: mobile oil in closed pores, sorbed and solid (kerogen) hydrocarbons. Experimental studies were carried out: the selection of the gases composition, the selection of surfactant compositions, the study of the possibility of thermal exposure by over-heated water injection. The project is currently at the stage of determining the effectiveness of each method, selecting a technology for specific field conditions and identifying which hydrocarbon resources each method is aimed at extracting.
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