Mobility of Ethomeen C12 and Carbon Dioxide (CO2) Foam at High Temperature/High Salinity and in Carbonate Cores

Abstract

Summary The low viscosity and density of carbon dioxide (CO2) usually result in the poor sweep efficiency in CO2-flooding processes, especially in heterogeneous formations. Foam is a promising method to control the mobility and thus reduce the CO2 bypass because of the gravity override and heterogeneity of formations. A switchable surfactant, Ethomeen C12, has been reported as an effective CO2-foaming agent in a sandpack with low adsorption on pure-carbonate minerals. Here, the low mobility of Ethomeen C12/CO2 foam at high temperature (120 °C), high pressure (3,400 psi), and high salinity [22 wt% of total dissolved solids (TDS)] was demonstrated in Silurian dolomite cores and in a wide range of foam qualities. The influence of various parameters, including aqueous solubility, thermal and chemical stability, flow rate, foam quality, salinity, temperature, and minimum-pressure gradient (MPG), on CO2 foam was discussed. A local-equilibrium foam model, the dry-out foam model, was used to fit the experimental data for reservoir simulation.

Exergy return on exergy investment analysis of natural-polymer (Guar-Arabic gum) enhanced oil recovery process

“…However, the improvement can be limited because of phase segregation. A more potent way to reduce the mobility of CO 2 is to disperse the gas in aqueous phase with surfactants [8,[23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30]. CO 2 Foam in porous media is a dispersion of CO 2 in aqueous phase such that the aqueous phase (wetting phase) is continuous and at least some part of the CO 2 (non-wetting phase) is made discontinuous by thin liquid films called lamella [31,8,[32][33][34][35].…”

“…Therefore the injection mode for these surfactants is called surfactant-alternating-gas (SAG). Well-known ionic surfactants have been introduced in detail from literature [26,29,[37][38][39][40][41]. Novel CO 2 soluble surfactants include the nonionic exthoxylated alcohols and switchable exthoxylated amines [27,40,[42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49].…”

Destabilization, Propagation, and Generation of Surfactant-Stabilized Foam during Crude Oil Displacement in Heterogeneous Model Porous Media

“…These effects occur because lamellae that form perpendicular to the direction of flow provide significant capillary resistance; thus, the effective gas-phase viscosity increases dramatically. Moreover, a substantial fraction of the gas becomes trapped 2,[11][12][13][14][15][16] as stationary bubbles; thereby, reducing the foam flow path. The fraction of gas in a trapped state is found to be a monotonically decreasing function of total superficial velocity.…”

Effect of Surfactant Partitioning Between Gaseous Phase and Aqueous Phase on $$\hbox {CO}_{2}$$ CO 2 Foam Transport for Enhanced Oil Recovery

“…However some nonionic surfactants, mainly ethoxylated alcohols, are CO 2 soluble thus making it possible to inject surfactants with gas phase (Xing et al 2012). Besides nonionic surfactants, some novel CO 2 soluble surfactants, ethoxylated amines, (Chen et al 2015;Chen et al 2014;Cui et al 2016) can switch from nonionic to cationic by protonating the amine group according to the pH in solutions (Cui et al 2014). Injected in CO 2 , the surfactant will automatically dissolve into the aqueous phase and foam (Elhag et al 2014).…”