Investigation of the Effect of Nanoparticle-Stabilized Foam on EOR: Nitrogen Foam and Methane Foam

Abstract

In recent years, studies conducted on foam stabilization have focused on nanoparticles by generating strong adsorption at the interface to stabilize the foam under harsh reservoir conditions. Meanwhile, the selection of a gas source is also of great importance for foam performance. In this study, a mixed system of surfactants was selected, and the foamability and foam stability of nitrogen and methane were evaluated according to the improved jet method. After adding modified SiO 2 nanoparticles, the foam-related parameters were analyzed. The plugging abilities of the different foams were compared through core-flooding experiments, and the oil displacement effects of the different foams were compared through microfluidic experiments. The results show that the amphoteric surfactant betaine has an excellent synergistic effect on the anionic surfactant SDS. The methane foam produced using the jet method has a larger initial volume than the nitrogen foam, but its stability is poor. The half-life of the nitrogen foam is about two times that of the methane foam. After adding 1.0 wt % SiO 2 nanoparticles to the surfactant solution, the viscosity and stability of the formed foam improve. However, the maximum viscosity of the surfactant nanoparticle foam (surfactant-NP foam) is 53 mPa·s higher than that of the surfactant foam. In the core-flooding experiment, the plugging performance of the methane foam was worse than that of the nitrogen foam, and in the microfluidic experiment, the oil displacement abilities of the methane foam and the nitrogen foam were similar. The plugging performance and the oil displacement effect of the foam are greatly improved by adding nanoparticles. The surfactant-NP foam flooding has a better oil displacement effect and can enhance the recovery factor by more than 30%. Under actual high-pressure reservoir conditions, although the stability of the methane foam is weaker than that of the nitrogen foam, some methane may be dissolved in the crude oil to decrease the viscosity after the foam collapses, which leads to the methane foam being the preferred method in oilfields.

Synergistic Effects between Anionic and Sulfobetaine Surfactants for Stabilization of Foams Tolerant to Crude Oil in Foam Flooding

“…It is seen that for both AES/C 16 HSB and SDS/C 16 HSB systems, f reaches a maximum with increasing total surfactant concentration to about 5 mM, and in general, the SDS/C 16 HSB The above results were obtained for foams produced by hand shaking surfactant solutions in a cylinder. In real foam flooding process, however, foams are usually produced by coinjection of gas and surfactant solution into porous media (Hosseini-Nasab et al, 2018;Hussain et al, 2019;Lu et al, 2017;Xu et al, 2020). The bubbling method is, therefore, often used for producing foams for performance evaluation (Chen et al, 2019;Kumar et al, 2020;Manan, 2015).…”

“…To avoid these problems, improved or modified ASP flooding like SP flooding free of alkali (Aoudia et al, 2006;Iglauer et al, 2009;Olajire, 2014;Samanta et al, 2011;Sheng, 2014;Zhang et al, 2004;Zhu et al, 2012) and ASP flooding using weak or organic alkalis (Bai et al, 2014;Olajire, 2014;Sharma et al, 2015;Sheng, 2014;Zhu et al, 2012) have been proposed and investigated. Unfortunately, traditional surfactants efficient in ASP flooding such as petroleum surfactants and heavy alkyl benzene surfactants are less or not efficient in absence of caustic alkali, and new surfactants should be designed (Bai et al, 2014;Iglauer et al, 2009Iglauer et al, , 2010Li et al, 2020;Yan et al, 2017Yan et al, , 2019.…”

“…On the other hand, foam flooding using conventional commercial surfactants has become another attractive technique and has been paid more attention recently (Amirmoshiri et al, 2018;Bashir et al, 2019;Chen et al, 2018;Da et al, 2018;Hosseini-Nasab and Zitha, 2017;Hurtado et al, 2018;Jian et al, 2015;Lu et al, 2017;Manan et al, 2015;Pu et al, 2019;Rezvani et al, 2020;Risal et al, 2018;Wang et al, 2009Wang et al, , 2019Xu et al, 2020;Yang et al, 2017;Yekeen et al, 2017;Zhu et al, 2004). Foam flooding greatly improved the efficiency of gas injection for enhanced oil recovery (EOR), which suffers from problems such as gas segregation, viscous fingering, and gas channeling through highpermeability zones so that poor sweep efficiencies were usually obtained (Da et al, 2018;Hosseini-Nasab and Zitha, 2017;Xu et al, 2020;Zhu et al, 2004). When gas was dispersed in water as small bubbles stabilized by surfactants, the displacing fluid is changed from gas to foams, which display much higher apparent viscosity than gas and good plugging properties and reduce significantly the permeability of the gas phase inhibiting viscous fingering.…”

“…When gas was dispersed in water as small bubbles stabilized by surfactants, the displacing fluid is changed from gas to foams, which display much higher apparent viscosity than gas and good plugging properties and reduce significantly the permeability of the gas phase inhibiting viscous fingering. Specifically, for heterogeneous porous reservoirs, the foam flooding will aid division of the injected fluid from high‐permeability area to nonswept low‐permeability layers (Pu et al, 2019; Xu et al, 2020; Yekeen et al, 2017).…”

Special Issue “Fluid Dynamics, Multi-Phase Flow, and Thermal Recovery Methods”

“…Intricate fluid flow and transport phenomena in porous media are ubiquitous in natural processes and engineering systems. Therefore, it is essential to improve our understanding of these phenomena from both the point of view of experiments and of simulations [1][2][3][4][5]. The relevance of the topic "Fluid Dynamics, Multi-Phase Flow, and Thermal Recovery Methods" in the fields of petroleum engineering, mechanical engineering, and chemical engineering is proven by the numerous research papers, reviews, and journals worldwide that address this topic, as well as by many successful Special Issues published in MDPI journals.…”