Experimental Study on CO₂ Foam Flooding Characteristics

Abstract

In CO2 foam flooding progress, foams formed by CO2 and surfactant solution can reduce the fluidity of CO2, improve sweep efficiency and flow behavior of CO2 in heterogeneous oil reservoir, prevent fingering and channeling and improve recovery efficiency. However, the study on the CO2 foam flooding characteristics is still in the initial stage, this paper focused on experimental testing the CO2 foam fluid flooding characteristics. Factors affecting the foam flooding efficiency, such as surfactant concentration, foam quality, injection method and core permeability, were studied in more detail in the paper, and influencing laws of factors on flooding efficiency and recovery efficiency were analyzed, moreover, based on experiments, the optimum foam quality and injection method, which have a practical and theoretical significance to the engineering application, were obtained.

Influence of wettability and permeability heterogeneity on miscible CO2 flooding efficiency

“…In recent years considerable research efforts have also been devoted to develop CO 2 foams for EOR and hydraulic fracturing applications [14][15][16][17][18]. CO 2 foam flooding has all the advantages of CO 2 flooding and in addition the low viscosity problem is mostly solved as the stable CO 2 foams have few orders of magnitude higher viscosities.…”

“…Therefore, for reasonably homogeneous and low viscosity crude oil reservoirs CO 2 flooding may be a viable option for EOR. Various aspects of CO 2 flooding efficiency have been addressed using laboratory, field scale, and computer simulation studies [18][19][20][21][22][23].…”