Understanding Foam Flow with a New Foam EOR Model Developed from Laboratory and Field Data of the Naturally Fractured Cantarell Field

Abstract

As much of the oil in the Akal field of the Cantarell complex is contained in the low permeability oil wet matrix, foam injection has been proposed as a method to control fluid mobility in the fracture, with the possible added benefit of transporting surfactant into the matrix so that additional oil could be liberated through a reduction of interfacial tension between oil and water (if this effect is significant for the surfactant in question). Presented in this paper is the work flow undertaken during an extensive study of all available laboratory experiments and pilot single well foam injection tests. Laboratory experiments ranged from simple water plus surfactant imbibition tests and surfactant flooding tests, to more complex foam flooding in split core experiments and co-injection of surfactant and gas for generation of foam in-situ. There were three field pilot single well foam injection tests that were included in this analysis that were of the huff-and-puff design. This extensive analysis was done with the aid of numerical simulation that resulted in the development of a novel foam model that handles both mobility control and interfacial tension reduction effects, and is capable of simulating foam degradation, foam regeneration, and trapped foam phenomena. Previous foam models available in commercial numerical simulators were not capable of simulating all of these foam effects together. It is shown that with identical foam parameters, this model matches all laboratory core flood studies as well as the field pilot tests, showing that this foam model is capable of predicting foam performance in both laboratory and field settings. The foam components can be chosen to be defined as either gaseous or aqueous components and this choice is shown to affect the impact of capillary pressure on foam flow into the matrix. Also discussed in this paper are details of how the foam behaves when injected into a gas saturated zone where the foam combines with in-situ gas, resulting in higher foam qualities than was injected. It is demonstrated that foam mobility control as a function of foam quality is an important aspect for matching field performance. The significance of correct foam density calculations is also discussed using field scale models. The work done to match the many laboratory and field scale foam tests resulted in a significant improvement of the understanding of foam degradation, regeneration, permeability blockage, and flow in porous media and the phenomena responsible for generating incremental oil.

Capillary Desaturation Curve for Residual Nonwetting Phase in Natural Fractures

“…Five different physical-model fractures were designed for capillary desaturation experiments to test the new expression for the capillary number. In the literature, different experimental approaches are presented, including splitting the core into two halves, which are then reassembled with a spacer in between (Haugen et al 2012;Skoreyko et al 2012). However, one cannot observe directly the flow inside an opaque rock sample.…”

Evaluating the Transport Behavior of CO2 Foam in the Presence of Crude Oil under High-Temperature and High-Salinity Conditions for Carbonate Reservoirs

“…CO 2 foam − can increase the apparent viscosity of CO 2 by decreasing the relative permeability of CO 2 gas in porous media. Thus, the mobility of CO 2 can be decreased, making CO 2 foam a promising technique for enhancing the oil recovery of miscible CO 2 flooding process.…”

Comparison of Implicit-Texture and Population-Balance Foam Models

“…The dynamic version of the models are sometimes called "full physics" models (Chen et al, 2010;Ma et al, 2015). The IT models are often referred to as "empirical" (Rossen et al, 1999) or "semi-empirical" and lacking in essential physics (Kovscek et al, 1995;Chen et al, 2010;Skoreyko et al, 2012;Ma et al, 2015). Ma et al (2015) review a wide range of foam models and their assumptions.…”

“…An essential test for models is their ability to fit available data. Skoreyko et al (2012) represent foam generation, foam degradation and trapped foam by defining a set of first order, nonreversible reactions. They use Arrhenius-type equations to compute reaction rates.…”