Sharif Digital Repository

The development of an oil field plays an important role in the optimum production. In the past, several wells have been used in a multi layer reservoir to produce oil from each layer. It costs oil industry billions of dollars and the problem would be more severe in the offshore. Nowadays, one well can produce oil from different pay zones in a reservoir. In this type of well called smart or intelligent well, production tubing is in common between pay zones and some chokes are installed on the tubing to produce oil from different layers. The size of choke usually varies and can be controlled by an electrical system installed in the well. As each pay interval has different capacity in terms of... 

Relative permeability is an important factor that controls the two phase fluid flow in porous media. The use of carbon dioxide in enhanced oil recovery methods is common. But the question is, how does the carbon dioxide affect the relative permeability curves? In this thesis, the CO2-oil relative permeability is measured in CO2 flooding process with unsteady state method. For this purpose, the core flooding apparatus is used and the results are compared with N2-oil relative permeability in N2 flooding. The results of comparison show that oil relative permeability in CO2 flooding is higher than N2 flooding. Reduction of Interfacial tension and oil viscosity, solubility of CO2 in oil and oil... 

Management decisions, enhanced oil recovery, and reservoir development plans in petroleum industries are based on predictions by reservoir simulation. Due to uncertainties in model parameters or engineering assumptions, the simulation results are not accurate, while they are correct. For more accurate estimation of unknown production quantities, it is required to characterize the unknown parameters and its uncertainty. By using static data alone the result of characterization is unreliable and unsure, therefore dynamic data use practically. In reservoir engineering literature, this is called “History Matching”.The ensemble Kalman filter is an optimal recursive data processing algorithm based... 

Nitrogen injection is a promising enhanced oil recovery process. Asphaltene precipitation during miscible gas injection is a common problem in oilfields throughout the world. In this work, a comprehensive study is conducted on effect of gas injection on phase behavior and asphaltene instability of live oil samples. Effects of oil API, gas type and concentration, pressure and temperature are studied under natural depletion and nitrogen injection processes by means of high pressure filtration and a photographic procedure coupled with image analysis. Filtration results show that nitrogen destabilizes asphaltenes more compared to methane and the problem is more severe for heavier crude samples.... 

There are a lot of Fractured reservoirs around the world that have large portion of oil production. These reservoirs have complex structure and fractures have important role in production but the remaining oil in matrix causes that the oil recovery decreases. One of the most important factors in these reservois are wettability. Because most of the fractured reservoirs are oil wet and water injection process in these reservoirs are not effective and chemical EOR methods such as surfactant flooding method is used. Surfactant improve oil recovery by two reasons: 1- reduction of interfacial tension between oil and water . 2-Wettability alteration of matrix. The porpose of this project is... 

After primary and secondary recovery processes more than 50 percent of oil remains in reservoirs. Therefore for more recovery from these reservoirs, methods of enhanced oil recovery should be applied.In this paper the effect of nanoparticles of SiO2 in size of 14 nm, on wettability is investigated. Using this nanoparticle, the wettability of carbonate rock in reservoirs could be changed and alter from oil-wet or mix-wet to water-wet. To assess this, hydrophilic changes of sandstone core and carbonate core are studied using the contact angle test. The same test is done on the carbonate core saturated with brine and oil that had received injection with brine and nanoparticles of SiO2 with two... 

Reservoir lifetime optimization is an important issue. The policies that are used for maximum production using optimization methods become challenging in the presence of uncertainty. Robust Optimization (RO) method is a technique to deal with uncertainty. Because of insufficient data, uncertainty is an inherent characteristic of reservoir model. This leads to inexact solutions of an optimization problem. Also, design based on uncertainty in economic parameters, especially uncertain oil price is a challenging issue. Taking the uncertainty explicitly is a solution when there is no measurement available. To take into account uncertainty several possible values (realizations) for the uncertainty... 

In recent years, due to the development of smart wells, optimization of waterflooding by injection/production rate control has receivedsome interests. We can postpone breakthrough time and increase the sweep efficiency by using inflow control valves (ICV). Due to complexity of reservoirs, existence of constraints and numerous influencing parameters, we need a robust and suitable optimization approach to overcome such problems. In this thesis, model predictive control (MPC) is chosen to be our optimization approach. MPC is suitable for constrained multi variable functions. Genetic algorithm is was chosenas optimizer. Eclipse reservoir simulator was used for reservoir simulation. Eclipse input... 

From previous years, water injection was considered as one of the most common methods for enhanced oil recovery. But recently much attention has been paid on the use of low salinity water (LSW) as an enhanced oil recovery fluid. The main mechanism that causes improve oil recovery is wettability alteration to a more water wet state. The change observed in recovery factor during LSW flooding induced from changes in relative permeability and capillary pressure when different levels of salinity are used. However, a few researchers tried to evaluate how macroscopic flow functions depend on the salinity of injected water. To this end, a series oil displacements by water performed on sandstone rock... 

During production from gas condensate reservoirs, reservoir pressure decreses to lower than dew point pressure of the reservoir fluid. Consequently, condensates will form in near wellbore regions, which significantly decrease well productivity. One of the remediations that is recently proposed for solving this problem is wettability alteration of near wellbore region to gas wetting condition. In comparison to other methods, it provides a better permanency, which is its key advantage. The main purpose of this thesis is, quantitative, qualitative and modeling study of wettability alteration of rock to gas wetting condition and verification of modeling rsults for a reservoir rock sample. Also,... 

Excessive water production in highly heterogeneous mature reservoirs (water flooded or affected by water zones) leads to increased production costs. Water production causes sediment formation, creation of corrosion, water treatment and disposal, and finally due to the inefficiency of production, it leads to closure of the well.Among the methods introduced to reduce water production, the use of polymers and gels as an affordable and effective method has been widely used in enhanced oil recovery processes. The main mechanism in this method is blocking or limiting the major paths of water flow (fractures or high permeability zones) and thereby increasing sweep efficiency in water injection.... 

In this research oil production decline curve of heterogonous reservoirs was investigated. Heterogeneity is modeled by percolation theory and using Petrel software and mass balance equations are solved by Eclipse simulation software. In primary production stage which oil flows up the reservoir spontaneously by reservoir high internal pressure, decline curve is exponential. Changes in the characteristic parameter of the exponential decline curve with occupation probability and permeable objects size were investigated.In secondary production stage, after reducing the natural production potential of the reservoir, water injection is used to increase and stabilize the pressure and increase the... 

Asphaltenes are a polydisperse mixture of the heaviest and most polarizable fractions of the crude oil. They are defined according to their solubility properties as being soluble in aromatic solvents but insoluble in light paraffin solvents. Asphaltenes are usually responsible for many problems like wettability changes of the reservoir rock, pore clogging in the reservoir porous matrix and fouling in wellbore tubing and production surface facilities. Most of the studies in the literature, addressing the asphaltene precipitation and deposition (APD), are investigating natural depletion or gas injection process such as CO2 flooding. These studies show that asphaltene deposition and... 

In water drive or waterflooded reservoirs, a significant amount of oil is remained in the reservoir as the residual oil. A process known as gas assisted gravity drainage, in its tertiary mode, has been applied in a number of conventional reservoirs to recover this residual oil. Gravity drainage is the main mechanism of oil recovery in the gas assisted gravity drainage enhanced oil recovery process. Previous investigations has shown that gravity force, spreading coefficient, three phase capillary pressure and reservoir wettability have significant effect on oil recovered via this process. The feasibility of using such a process in a naturally fractured reservoir is investigated in this work... 

Gravity Drainage and Capillary Imbibition are among the most important mechanisms in oil production from carbonate fractured reservoirs. In order to investigate the feasibility and effects of these mechanisms in oil recovery from carbonate cores, some different experiments were carried out at Sharif University Laboratories. Carbonate cores were taken away from the well-known Asmari outcrop, Asmari Mountain in south east of M.I.S. city and used in these experiments. Oil and gas samples were collected from field separators and recombined to reservoir composition. The Gas-Oil ratio was adjusted to obtain the reservoir fluid properties. A core flooding apparatus with various capabilities was... 

Broadcasting in wireless ad hoc networks serves many important tasks such as data dissemination and route establishment in which one node sends its data to all other network nodes. The most popular form of broadcasting adopted by many ad-hoc protocols is flooding. In flooding, each node receiving a packet from a neighboring node rebroadcasts it exactly once. Wide adoption of flooding for broadcasting traffic is mainly due to its simplicity. The importance of performance analysis of flooding lies on its aforementioned popularity. The parameters of interest in analysis of flooding are network coverage, energy consumption and broadcast throughput while network coverage is the average percentage... 

One of the suitable methods in EOR processes is miscible and immiscible gas injection. By gas injection, it is possible to replace all the oil, which is in contact with the gas. However, reservoir heterogeneity, low density, and low viscosity of gas result in problems such as gravity segregation, and fingering and consequently the gas reach the production well without any significant contact with reservoir oil. A way to deal with this problem is gas injection in the form of foam. In fact, gas injection in this manner increases the oil production by decreasing gas mobility and the negative effects of reservoir heterogeneity on gas displacement. Foam stability has a key role on the efficiency... 

Surfactants are widely used in enhancing oil recovery. But application of worm-like micelles which seem to be a perfect candidate for enhancing heavy oil recovery have been less studied despite their significant ability in reducing interfacial tension and their high viscosity. This research consists of three parts. In the first part, the kinetic and equilibrium adsorption of surfactant on reservoir rock is experimentally investigated, and its appropriate kinetic and equilibrium adsorption model is specified. According to the adsorption models, the pseudo second order kintic coefficient of adsorption is proved to have a linear relationship with concentration, so its value at different... 

Water flooding is one of the improved oil recovery methods that has been used for past decades. The water flooding efficiency is calculated in two different scale; macroscopic scale and microscopic scale. The efficiency in macroscopic scale is called volume sweep efficiency (Ev) and in microscopic scale, displacement sweep efficiency (Ed). A special type of hydrocarbon reservoirs are composed of several permeable units in an impermeable shaley background in a way that hydrocarbon can just flow through the permeable units. The predominant feature of such reservoirs is continuity of permeable units that affecting the flow behavior. This simplification enables us to model such reservoirs by... 

Due to the decrease in oil reserves in the world, increasing population and the growing demands for oil consumption in the world, increasing the oil recovery from oil reservoirs has become more important. Increasing the amount of oil production efficiency by using low salinity water/modified salinity water has been highly appreciated during the last two decades. Low-salt water is a new method, due to its advantages such as low cost, simplicity of operation and low environmental hazards. It is believed that low salinity water can alter the rock wettability from a more oil-wetting state to a more water-wetting state. In order to be able to predict the performance of low salinity water...