Enhanced oil recovery mechanism of low oxygen air injection in high water cut reservoir

Abstract

Whether air injection can extract additional oil in high water cut reservoirs is a big question. In this paper, long-core displacement experiment has been carried out to investigate the potential of low oxygen air flooding in high water cut reservoirs. Results indicate that implementing low oxygen air injection has potential to improve oil recovery in high water cut light oil reservoir. The reservoir with higher matrix permeability and or lower reservoir permeability contrast ratio is desirable to achieve higher oil recovery factor. In addition, the oil recovery factor for water/gas alternate injection (WAG) strategy is higher than that of continuous low oxygen air flooding. And the WAG strategy has the ability to delay gas breakthrough compared with the strategy of continuous low oxygen air injection under same experiment condition.

Nano-fluid viscosity screening and study of in situ foam pressure buildup at high-temperature high-pressure conditions

“…In most EOR technologies, such as surfactant flooding, polymer-surfactant flooding and foam flooding, surfactants play unprecedented roles that include reduction in interfacial tension and sometimes in gas mobility control (Moradi et al 2019;Hanamertani et al 2018;Dang et al 2017;Kamal et al 2017;Soleimani et al 2015). A major technical challenge during chemical and gas flooding that received widespread interests is the effect of viscous fingering and early gas breakthrough (Jia et al 2017;Xu et al 2016;Hendraningrat and Zhang 2015). The major factor responsible for viscous fingering is viscosity difference between the injected chemical fluids and the crude oil (Fuseni et al 2018;Jackson et al 2017;Jamaloei et al 2010Jamaloei et al , 2016.…”

Maximizing enhanced oil recovery via oxidative cracking of crude oil: employing air injection and H2O2 with response surface methodology optimization

“…It is believed that catalysis is associated with these highly reactive free radicals, thereby enhancing the quality of the obtained liquid fractions. These heavy macromolecules, such as asphaltenes and resins, contain stable free radicals generated from the breaking of chemical bonds in molecules as a consequence of catalytic cracking, in addition to the radicals formed when H 2 O 2 decomposes [30,[60][61][62]. High-molecular-weight radicals could potentially combine with fragments of petroleum molecules, which are radicals generated from the cracking process, as depicted in the proposed mechanism:…”