Application of foam floods for enhancing heavy oil recovery through stability analysis and core flood experiments

Abstract

This work concerns the investigation of foam application to enhance heavy oil recovery through stability analysis tests, core floods, and data assessment. Monitoring transient behaviour of foam heights in a glass column showed that salt/alkaline concentration/type significantly affects the stability of foam. Meanwhile, the ionic nature of the surfactant and gas type also plays a crucial role. Therefore, the foam stability analysis should be helpful for the successful design of foam floods in enhanced oil recovery (EOR) processes. The surfactants that gave the most stable foam were used in core floods, and found that an increase in surfactant alternating gas (SAG) ratio decreases the oil recovery; furthermore, the efficiency of Cetrimonium Bromide (CTAB) is lower than that of Sodium Dodecyl Sulfate (SDS) in a sandstone core. Finally, the Leverage approach was used to assess the obtained data points of stability as well as core flooding tests through the developed least square supported vector machine (LS-SVM) models. It confirms the validity of experimental data.

Monitoring the behaviour of anionic polymer‐anionic surfactant stabilized foam in the absence and presence of oil: Bulk and bubble‐scale experimental analyses

“…The application of foam for reducing the undesirable effects of fingering and gravity segregation in gas injection has attracted a rapidly increasing interest in recent years . The complex effect of oil on the behaviour of foam is one of the major concerns with the performance of foam in enhanced oil recovery processes.…”

Comprehensive Water–Alternating-Gas (WAG) injection study to evaluate the most effective method based on heavy oil recovery and asphaltene precipitation tests

“…Therefore, it is called Advanced-Soave-Redlich-Kwang EOS (ASRK EOS). Alternative or sequential injections of fluids is an idea to enhance the oil recovery, which holds some merits [12,13]. One of the efficient EOR methods, which improves the oil recovery factor, is CO 2 injection [14].…”

Influence of formation heterogeneity on foam flooding performance using 2D and 3D models: an experimental study

“…Furthermore, the foam agents, which are surfactant-based materials, help in reducing the interfacial tension between oil and water and altering rocky wettability (Kamal 2016;Kumar et al 2008;Pu et al 2016). Therefore, a foam flooding process is not only capable of improving the sweep efficiency but also able to improve the microscopic displacement efficiency, which therefore results in a significantly high oil recovery factor (Farajzadeh et al 2009a(Farajzadeh et al , 2012Shokrollahi et al 2014).…”