The study on permeability reduction during steam injection in unconsolidated porous media

Pang, Zhanxi; Liu, Huiqing

doi:10.1016/j.petrol.2013.04.022

Cited by 15 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…The sandpack was 100 cm long and had an inner diameter of 3.0 cm. A water tank was filled with brine solution to simulate formation water . To ensure good reproducibility for all of the tests, 100 mesh fresh quartz sand was used as the unconsolidated core.…”

Section: Materials and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A water tank was filled with brine solution to simulate formation water. 18 To ensure good reproducibility for all of the tests, 100 mesh fresh quartz sand was used as the unconsolidated core. The pressure of the outlet was slightly higher than saturated water vapor pressure at 220 °C (approximately 2.4 MPa) and was controlled by a back-pressure valve.…”

Section: Steaming Floodingmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Mechanism of High Stability of Water-in-Oil Emulsions at High Temperature

et al. 2016

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Thermal flooding by steam injection was a traditional method for exploiting heavy oil. The produced liquid was a highly stable water-in-oil or oil-in-water emulsion in several oilfields. In this work, we focused on studying the effect of high temperature on the stability of an emulsion system involving two typical crude oils (heavy crude oil and light crude oil) and brine. It was impossible to directly measure the interfacial viscoelastic modulus because of the high viscosity of the heavy oil. In order to solve this problem and analyze the contribution of those fractions to the formation of stable emulsions, the heavy crude oil was divided into three cuts: remaining fraction, resin, and asphaltene. The model oils were prepared from the mixture of several heavy crude oil fractions with kerosene:xylene (1:1 v/v) to investigate the high-temperature behaviors of their emulsions. The stability was evaluated through a high-temperature–high-pressure (HTHP) visual pressure–volume–temperature cell, and a temperature up to 200 °C was achieved. The automatic pendant drop technique was used to analyze the interfacial rheology of model oils/brine system under HTHP conditions. With increasing formation temperature, the kinetically stable heavy oil emulsion had a much higher viscosity. The stabilities of heavy crude oil and light crude oil emulsions had opposite trends as the formation temperature increased. The stabilities of different model oils indicated that the mass fraction of asphaltene was responsible for the stability of emulsions at high temperature. With increasing temperature, the interfacial viscoelastic properties stabilized by 4.0 wt % asphaltenes had an increasing trend, but the stability of remaining fraction, resin, and 0.4 wt % asphaltene had a decreasing trend. The mechanism of formation of a stable and more rigid interfacial film was revealed by the effect of high temperature on asphaltene aggregation and water molecules.

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Section: Materials and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Steaming Floodingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mechanism of High Stability of Water-in-Oil Emulsions at High Temperature

et al. 2016

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“…In particular, shear-thinning fluids are commonly injected in Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) to reduce the amount of unrecovered oil after waterflooding by reducing mobility in high-permeability layers and creating a transverse pressure gradient that promotes fluid migration into less permeable layers ( Silva et al, 2012 ). Most of the heavy oil reservoirs belong to unconsolidated formations ( Pang and Liu, 2013 ). Therefore, predicting the relationships between flow rate and pressure drop for shear-thinning fluids flow in unconsolidated porous media is of vital importance and has been the scope of major research efforts ( Chhabra and Srinivas, 1991;Rao and Chhabra, 1993;Smit and du Plessis, 1997;Tiu et al, 1997;Machac et al, 1998;Chhabra et al, 2001 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Non-Darcian flow of shear-thinning fluids through packed beads: Experiments and predictions using Forchheimer's law and Ergun's equation

Castro

Radilla

2017

Advances in Water Resources

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The flow of shear-thinning fluids through unconsolidated porous media is present in a number of important industrial applications such as soil depollution, Enhanced Oil Recovery or filtration of polymeric liquids. Therefore, predicting the pressure drop-flow rate relationship in model porous media has been the scope of major research efforts during the last decades. Although the flow of Newtonian fluids through packs of spherical particles is well understood in most cases, much less is known regarding the flow of shear-thinning fluids as high molecular weight polymer aqueous solutions. In particular, the experimental data for the non-Darcian flow of shear-thinning fluids are scarce and so are the current approaches for their prediction. Given the relevance of non-Darcian shear-thinning flow, the scope of this work is to perform an experimental study to systematically evaluate the effects of fluid shear rheology on the flow rate-pressure drop relationships for the non-Darcian flow through different packs of glass spheres. To do so, xanthan gum aqueous solutions with different polymer concentrations are injected through four packs of glass spheres with uniform size under Darcian and inertial flow regimes. A total of 1560 experimental data are then compared with predictions coming from different methods based on the extension of widely used Ergun's equation and Forchheimer's law to the case of shear thinning fluids, determining the accuracy of these predictions. The use of a proper definition for Reynolds number and a realistic model to represent the rheology of the injected fluids results in the porous media are shown to be key aspects to successfully predict pressure drop-flow rate relationships for the inertial shear-thinning flow in packed beads.

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