Overview of Selected Oil Recovery Processes

Immiscible liquid-liquid displacement in capillary tubes: viscoelastic effects

“…An overview of selected oil recovery processes shows that hydrolyzed polyacrilamide and bio-polymers, as xanthan gun, are commonly pumped into oil reservoir in order to aid oil recovery by providing mobility control to the injection water, as extensively discussed in the articles of Dreher and Gogarty (1979), Johansen (1979) and Khagram, Gupta and Sridhar (1985). These materials are non-Newtonian, presenting high viscoelastic behavior.…”

The rheological characterization of HPG gels: Measurement of slip velocities in capillary tubes

“…It is reasonable, then, to assume that slip phenomena also occur in the commercial application of this type of material. However, though polymer flooding has received considerable attention by petroleum engineers over the years, see for example [1][2][3][17][18][19], the slip phenomenon and its possible effects on oll recovery process were seldom addressed. Recently, Clark [15], Cloud and Clark [16], and Pilehvari and Clark [5] showed clearly that the cross-linked gels exhibit slip behavior when smooth and rough channel data were compared.…”

Pore scale analysis of the impact of mixing-induced reaction dependent viscosity variations

“…An example may be fluids whose viscosity depends on the local shear rate instead of the reaction products. Shear thinning fluids have use in enhanced oil recovery [42,43] and subsurface remediations [40,44]. An alternative future path would be to include more realistic and complicated chemical reactions.…”