CO₂Foam Behavior in Carbonate Rock: Effect of Surfactant Type and Concentration

An understanding of how CO2 foam flows through a reservoir rock is useful for many subsurface applications, including enhanced oil recovery and CO2 storage. There are economic and environmental benefits in identifying surfactants that exhibit good foaming behavior with CO2 at both low concentrations and high foam qualities. Core flood...

Experimental Assessment of the Viability of High Temperature Steam Foam Applications

The efficiency of oil processes depends on the product of volumetric sweep and microscopic sweep. In oil recovery by steam injection the microscopic sweep is generally good; however, obtaining a good volumetric sweep can be challenging. This is caused by low density and viscosity of the injected steam combined with the reservoir heterogeneity...

Foam flow in a model porous medium: II. the effect of trapped gas

Gas trapping is an important mechanism in both Water or Surfactant Alternating Gas (WAG/SAG) and foam injection processes in porous media. Foams for enhanced oil recovery (EOR) can increase sweep efficiency as they decrease the gas relative permeability, and this is mainly due to gas trapping. However, gas trapping mechanisms are poorly...

Foam flow in a model porous medium: I. the effect of foam coarsening

Foam structure evolves with time due to gas diffusion between bubbles (coarsening). In a bulk foam, coarsening behaviour is well defined, but there is less understanding of coarsening in confined geometries such as porous media. Previous predictions suggest that coarsening will cause foam lamellae to move to low energy configurations in the...

Surfactant Screening for Foam EOR: Correlation between Bulk and Core-Flood Experiments

tAqueous foams play an important role in many industrial processes, from ore separation by froth flotationto enhanced oil recovery (EOR). In the latter case, the foam is used as a means of increasing the sweepefficiency through the oil bearing rock – the complex, structure dependent, flow behavior of the foammeans that it has improved...

Effect of Surfactant Concentration on Foam: From Coreflood Experiments to Implicit-Texture Foam-Model Parameters

We present a comparative study of foam coreflood experiments with various surfactant concentrations. Plots of apparent viscosity vs. injected gas fraction were obtained for surfactant concentrations at the critical micelle concentration and above. Bulk foam stability was measured for all concentrations and compared with the coreflood results....

Small core flood experiments for foam EOR: Screening surfactant applications

Aqueous foams are a means of increasing the sweep efficiency of enhanced oil recovery processes. An understanding of how a foam behaves in the presence of oil is therefore of great importance when selecting suitable surfactants for EOR processes. The consensus is currently that the most reliable method for determining the foam behavior in the...