Sharif Digital Repository

This work aims to discuss the results of wide ranges of laboratory investigations to evaluate the performance of a newly-formulated surfactant for heavy oil reservoirs in order to improve the microscopic sweep efficiency after water flooding processes. In the first part, the specific behavior of the formulated surfactant including its salinity tolerance, interfacial tension, and optimum performance window was determined. Then, the application of surfactant solutions in real sandstone reservoir rocks was assessed for both oil-wet and water-wet cases. Besides, the effect of changing the capillary and viscous forces and interfacial tension on the residual phase saturations were characterized.... 

Nitrogen has emerged as a competitive gas injection alternative for gas-based enhanced oil recovery processes in the past two decades. The injection of nitrogen into the reservoirs has improved the oil recovery efficiency in various oil reservoirs from heavy to volatile oils. As it is known, interfacial tension (IFT) plays a key role in any enhanced oil recovery process, particularly gas injection processes; therefore, its accurate determination is crucial for the design of any gas injection process especially at reservoir condition. In this study, an axisymmetric drop shape analysis (ADSA) was utilized to measure the equilibrium IFTs between crude oil and N2 at different temperature levels... 

Optimization of any production operation is a tool for increasing production rates and reducing production costs. Water flooding is one of the techniques that frequently be used to increase oil recovery after primary depletion. A methodology for optimizing the production by using the net present value of a heterogeneous reservoir under water flooding has been presented, which is based on controlling the bottomhole pressures of the production wells, using smart well technology. For this purpose, a numerical flow simulator is coupled with an optimization program. The technique was implemented on a synthetic two dimensional oil reservoir with heterogeneous permeability. This optimization... 

Reservoir permeability is an important parameter that its reliable prediction is necessary for reservoir performance assessment and management. Although many empirical formulas are derived regarding permeability and porosity in sandstone reservoirs, these correlations cannot be accurately depicted in carbonate reservoir for the wells that are not cored and for which there are no welltest data. Therefore, having a framework for estimation of these parameters in reservoirs with neither coring samples nor welltest data is crucial. Rock properties are characterized by using different well logs. However, there is no specific petrophysical log for estimating rock permeability; thus, new methods... 

Reservoir characterization, especially during early stages of reservoir life, is very uncertain, due to the scarcity of data. Reservoir connectivity and permeability evaluation is of great importance in reservoir characterization. The conventional approach to addressing this is computationally very expensive and time consuming. Therefore, there is a great incentive to produce much simpler alternative methods. In this paper, we use a statistical approach called the percolation theory, which considers a hypothesis wherein the reservoir can be split into either permeable (i.e. sand/fracture) or impermeable flow units (i.e. shale/matrix), and assumes that the connectivity of permeability... 

Petroleum production often involves simultaneous flow of three immiscible fluids through underground porous rock formation. In this work, we measure two- and three-phase relative permeabilities with which we examine the performance of various 3-phase relative permeability models. The rock-fluid systems used in these measurements are comprised of sandstone samples, oil (n-decane), water (Nacl, 6000. ppm) and gas (nitrogen). The measurements were carried out at 23 ± 1 °C and 5.44 MPa. Two- and three-phase relative permeability measurements were obtained using the steady-state technique. The three-phase experiments were conducted such that the flow rates of brine and gas were increased... 

This work concerns modeling of gas-oil gravity drainage for a single block of naturally fractured reservoirs. The nonlinearity induced from saturation-dependant capillary pressure and relative permeability functions makes a gravity drainage model difficult to analytically and numerically solve. Relating the capillary pressure and relative permeability functions is a potential method to overcome this problem. However, no attempt has been made in this regard. In this study a generalized one-dimensional form of gas-oil gravity drainage model in a single matrix block, presented in the literature, is considered. In contrast with commonly used forms of capillary pressure and relative permeability... 

Techniques of production data analysis for single-phase oil and gas reservoirs have advanced significantly over the past few years. These techniques range from traditional (Arps and Fetkovich) to modern (for the variation of operating conditions at the wellbore). The application of these techniques for analysis of the production data of a gas condensate reservoir may not yield reliable answers due to the fact that the flow of fluid in gas condensate reservoirs is not single-phase. This paper presents the treatment of a modern method of production data analysis (single-phase flow) to analyze the production data of a gas condensate reservoir (two-phase flow). For this purpose, a single-phase... 

The vapor extraction process (or VAPEX) uses vaporized solvents injected into a horizontal well to form a vapor chamber within the reservoir. Vapor dissolves in the oil and enhances the oil production by decreasing the oil viscosity in heavy oil reservoirs. To evaluate the process we conduct a simulation study on an Iranian heavy oil reservoir called Kuh-e-Mond. In addition, a semi-analytical investigation of the VAPEX process has been performed. The idea is to perform VAPEX simulation for a laboratory model and find a methodology to compare the results of the simulator with the semi-analytical Butler's model. In particular, a semi-analytical dimensionless correlation for production rate... 

Water and miscible gas injection scenarios are considered in an Iranian oil reservoir for the purpose of recovery improvement. Firstly reservoir fluid modeling and modeling of a slim tube test were performed. Then, water alternating gas (WAG) injection was evaluated by optimizing the WAG half cycle and WAG ratio. Alternatively, hybrid WAG and separate injection of water and gas in the top and bottom of the reservoir were also investigated. The numerical simulation results showed that the optimum WAG, with half cycle of 1.5 years and WAG ratio of one, gave the highest recovery factor. Moreover, economic evaluation of these scenarios indicated that WAG had the highest net present value and was... 

Almost all of the heavy oil reservoirs contain discontinuous permeability barriers (shales) with different structures. However, the effect of shaly layer geometrical characteristics including: spacing from wells, discontinuity, orientation, shaly layers' spacing and length, and heterogeneous distribution on oil recovery factor in the presence of gravity force are not well understood. In this work, a series of solvent injection experiments were conducted on various vertical one-quarter five-spot glass micromodels, containing barriers, which were initially saturated with a heavy oil sample. The oil recovery was measured by analysis of the pictures provided continuously during the injection... 

The use of adjusted/optimized saline water categorized into two different classes namely smart water (SW) and low salinity (LoSal) water injection has been proposed for more oil recovery from specific types of oil reservoirs. There are possible mechanisms concerning SW flooding that have been proposed in the literature, some of them are still subject to more examination. In this study, an experimental investigation is performed to determine the influence of type and amount of salt to the surface properties including interfacial tension (IFT) and contact angle (CA) of aqueous solution + acidic and asphaltenic crude oil + carbonate rock systems. For this purpose, the concentration of different... 

Screening analysis is a useful guideline that helps us with proper field selection for different enhanced oil recovery processes. In this work, reservoir simulation is combined with experimental design to estimate the effect of reservoir rock and fluid properties on performance of immiscible nitrogen injection. Reservoir dip, thickness, and horizontal permeability are found to be the most influential parameters. Possible interactions of parameters are also discussed to increase reliability and robustness of screening results. Finally, significance of both main effects and interactions are evaluated by employing a statistical inference approach (hypothesis testing) and results are compared to... 

Accurate prediction of the PVT properties of reservoir oil is of primary importance for improved oilfield development strategies. Experimental determination of these properties is expensive and time-consuming. Therefore, new empirical models for universal reservoir oils have been developed as a function of commonly available field data. In this communication, more than 750 experimental data series were gathered from different geographical locations worldwide. Successive linear programming and generalized reduced gradient algorithm as two constrained multivariable search methods were incorporated for modeling and expediting the process of achieving a good feasible solution. Moreover,... 

The authors simulated a reservoir by using two-layer perceptron. Indeed a model was developed to simulate the increase in oil recovery caused by bacteria injection into an oil reservoir. This model was affected by reservoir temperature and amount of water injected into the reservoir for enhancing oil recovery. Comparing experimental and simulation results and also the erratic trend of data show that the neural networks have modeled this system properly. Considering the effects of nonlinear factors and their erratic and unknown impacts on recovered oil, the perceptron neural network can develop a proper model for oil recovery factor in various conditions. The neural networks have not been... 

Microbial Enhanced Oil Recovery (MEOR) as a tertiary process employs microorganisms and their metabolites to reduce the residual oil saturation of the reservoir mainly through interfacial tension (IFT) reduction and wettability alteration. In spite of its great potential and the mentioned advantages, application of MEOR has been limited because of the lack of practical convincing experimental results. In this study, the effects of MEOR process on wettability changes and the reduction of residual oil saturation have been examined by providing microscopic visualization of two phase flow in transparent glass micromodels. Biosurfactant producing bacterial strain (Enterobacter cloacae) was... 

Viscosity of crude oil is a fundamental factor in simulating reservoirs, forecasting production as well as planning thermal enhanced oil recovery methods which make its accurate determination necessary. Experimental determination of reservoir oil viscosity is costly and time consuming. Hence, searching for quick and accurate determination of reservoir oil viscosity is inevitable. The objective of this study is to present a reliable, and predictive model namely, Least-Squares Support Vector Machine (LSSVM) to predict reservoir oil viscosity. To this end, three LSSVM models have been developed for prediction of reservoir oil viscosity in the three regions including, under-saturated, saturated... 

This work concerns simultaneous determination of relative permeability, capillary pressure, pore size distribution (PSD), and residual oil saturation data by optimization of well testing data, and introduces a new capillary pressure relationship, based on the Weibull distribution function, for direct determination of the PSD function from capillary pressure parameters. Three consecutive injection, fall off, and production well tests are performed on a predefined synthetic reservoir through simulation, and an optimization algorithm is used to find the parameters of relative permeability and capillary pressure curves as well as the value of residual oil saturation. The PSD function is also... 

In fractured reservoirs, a large variation of permeability due to the presence of fractures leads to changes in the production mechanism compared to conventional reservoirs. Hence, an appropriate model with the ability to describe the reservoir properly can provide a more confident prediction of its future performance. One of the features of a representative model is the number and height of the matrix blocks. The determination of these two parameters is one of the decisive steps in the calculation of an accurate amount of oil production from these reservoirs. In fact, matrix height shows its effect as a gravity force, which is one of the driving mechanisms. If the matrix height is less than... 

Multiple contact miscible floods such as injection of relatively inexpensive gases into oil reservoirs are considered as well-established enhanced oil recovery (EOR) techniques for conventional reservoirs. A fundamental factor in the design of gas injection project is the minimum miscibility pressure (MMP), whereas local sweep efficiency from gas injection is very much dependent on the MMP. Slim tube displacements, and rising bubble apparatus (RBA) are two main tests that are used for experimentally determination of MMP but these tests are both costly and time consuming. Hence, searching for quick and accurate mathematical determination of gas-oil MMP is inevitable. The objective of this...