Sensitivity analysis of the partitioning inter-well tracer test for oil saturation determination

The partitioning inter-well tracer test (PITT) is a method to determine average oil saturation between an injector-producer pair. Tracer tests can be used to quantify incremental oil recovery in enhanced oil recovery (EOR) pilots and for reservoir surveillance purposes. This study provides a sensitivity analysis of the inter-well tracer test,...

Modelling the effect of oil on foam for EOR: Local equilibrium behavior

Enhance Oil Recovery (EOR) techniques are theoretically very promising but in real life suffer the effects of many physical complications in the subsurface which are yet to be understood in detail. One such complication is the detrimental effect of oil in foam in foam EOR. Current-generation reservoir simulators represent these effects in an...

Modelling the effect of oil on foam with the wave curve method

Enhanced oil recovery by gas injection can show excellent displacement efficiency but may suffer from poor sweep efficiency. A promising method to overcome poor sweep efficiency in gas-injection enhanced oil recovery processes is foam injection. The effect of oil saturation on foam stability is complicated and not fully understood. Complexity in...

Modeling of wettability alteration during spontaneous imbibition of mutually soluble solvents in mixed wet fractured reservoirs

Mutually-soluble solvents can enhance oil recovery both in mixed-wet fractured reservoirs. When a partially waterwet matrix is surrounded by an immiscible wetting phase in the fracture, spontaneous imbibition is the most important production mechanism. Initially, the solvent moves with the imbibing brine into the core. However, upon contact with...

High-order simulation of foam enhanced oil recovery

If secondary hydrocarbon recovery methods fail because of the occurrence of gravity override or viscous fingering one can turn to an enhanced oil recovery method like the injection of foam. The generation of foam can be described by a set of partial differential equations with strongly nonlinear functions, which impose challenges for the...

Challenges in adjoint-based optimization of a foam EOR process

We apply adjoint-based optimization to a Surfactant-Alternating-Gas foam process using a linear foam model introducing gradual changes in gas mobility and a nonlinear foam model giving abrupt changes in gas mobility as function of oil and water saturations and surfactant concentration. For the linear foam model, the objective function is a...

Simulation Studies of Foam for Enhanced Oil Recovery

In gas-injection enhanced oil recovery (EOR), foam is a promising method to improve sweep. We studied foam for EOR through analytical modeling and simulations in two cases: the ability of foam to prevent gravity override over large distances and the effect of oil on foam processes. Shan and Rossen (2004) present a simple model for SAG ...

Foam for Enhanced Oil Recovery: Modeling and Analytical Solutions

Foam increases sweep in miscible- and immiscible-gas enhanced oil recovery by decreasing the mobility of gas enormously. This thesis is concerned with the simulations and analytical solutions for foam flow for the purpose of modeling foam EOR in a reservoir. For the ultimate goal of upscaling our modeling results to foam EOR in reservoir, it is...