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.... 

Dilute Surfactant flooding has been recognized as one of the significant processes in chemical flooding. Many oil reservoirs became appropriate candidates for surfactant/water flooding when screening criteria was developed. Injected surfactant tried to mobilize the residual oil that was trapped in interstice. The main contributing mechanism to enhance oil recovery by surfactant flooding was defined as rock wettability alteration. Wettability is one of the substantial parameters to choose the best approach for a successful surfactant flooding in which tiny change in wettability will lead to improve oil recovery fundamentally. In this experimental study the effect of different aging time and... 

The coning phenomenon usually occurs in water and gas cap drive reservoirs. Water coning in Iranian hydrocarbon reservoirs is one of the most important problems that affects the cumulative production, operation costs and causes environmental problems. Before producing from a reservoir, its fluids are in equilibrium and their contact surfaces remain unchanged, but after starting production from the reservoir, when the viscous force overcome gravitational force in vertical direction, contact surfaces will displace and coning will occur. So, the production rates will be controlled in a range that prevents entering water and gas to the production well. For this reason, investigation and modeling... 

The knowledge of the conductivity across the reservoir that is based on the swept fraction controls the recoverable rates of the hydrocarbon in the secondary displacement processes. Most of the time, we need a fast estimation of the conductivity for decision making during field development. Percolation theory is a very useful tool to get this goal. According to this fact that the results of this method are universal, they could be used widely. In this study connectivity and conductivity percolation models are developed and the universal exponents for connectivity and conductivity in fractured reservoir as well as their dependency on the correlation length are investigated. For L< ξ the... 

In offshore Iran, wellbore instability is quite common and the main cause for most of problems during drilling operations. In this study, the existing relevant logs, drilling and other data from offset well were analyzed and integrated to construct a precise Mechanical Earth Model (MEM) describing pore pressure, stress magnitudes and orientation, and formation mechanical properties of the South Pars Gas field. Then, the constructed MEM was refined and calibrated using the existing caliper, image logs, rock mechanical core test and drilling data and through history matching to constrain and reduce the uncertainties associated with limitations and availability of the existing data. Using the... 

In recent years, growing interest in underbalanced drilling has resulted in the rapid development of its associated equipment technology, practices, and procedures. Underbalanced drilling is used to avoid lost circulation, formation damage, and decreasing weight on bit. However, the risk of wellbore collapse due to lake of hydrostatic mud pressure is high; therefore, using good geo-mechanical model may avoid wellbore instability problems. In order to evaluate the potential for wellbore instability, it is necessary to use an elastoplastic model to compute the stresses and strains around the bore hole. Furthermore, it should be mentioned that the laser drilling process depends extremely on the... 

Simultaneous water and CO2 injection has been performed on a sandstone core to evaluate oil recovery under the secondary and tertiary near-miscible injection modes. It is demonstrated that secondary SWACO2 injection as well as tertiary flood is an effective method for the oil/residual oil recovery from oil saturated/water-flooded porous media. In the secondary SWACO2 injection, the ultimate oil recovery increases by increasing SWAG ratio from 0.2 to 0.4 but due to some limits, e.g. topological effects, prohibiting contacting of injected gas with residual oil in pores, altering SWAG ratio from 0.4 to 0.6 showed no effect on ultimate oil recovery. Secondary SWACO2 injection can recover higher... 

Movement and transportation of fine particles in formations leads to clogging the pores and reduction in permeability. This type of formation damage is stronglycontingent upon water salinity and ionic conditions in the formation. The main parameters which control the particle release are the interactions and forces between particles and porous medium surfaces. Changing salinity which leads to pH alteration, affects these interactions and subsequently the fine migration process. Hence, pH and salinity variations should be considered to study and evaluate the portion of fine migration in formation damage. The principal challenge in this research therefore, is to try to change the surface... 

Hydrocarbon production decline as a result of formation damage caused by fines migration has been widely observed in laboratory corefloods and natural flows in porous media. Permeability impairment due to fines migration is explained by different capture mechanisms of already released particles at some pore sites. Preventing detachment of in-situ particles from the rock surface during enhanced oil recovery (EOR) agent injection into the porous media has been reported recently. In this experimental study, the effect of five types of metal oxide nanoparticles; γ-AI2O3, ZnO, CuO, MgO and SiO: to adsorb the fine particles existing in the flowing suspension has been investigated. In each test,... 

Steam injection process has been considered for a long time as an effective method to exploit heavy oil resources. Over the last decades, Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage (SAGD) has been proved as one of the best steam injection methods for recovery of unconventional oil resources. Recently, Fast-SAGD, a modification of the SAGD process, makes use of additional single horizontal wells alongside the SAGD well pair to expand the steam chamber laterally. This method uses fewer wells and reduces the operational cost compared to a SAGD operation requiring paired parallel wells one above the other. The efficiency of this new method in naturally fractured reservoir is not well understood.... 

The concern over fossil energy shortage for the next decade leads to the extensive research activities in the area of enhanced oil recovery. Steam injection as one of well known EOR process has been used for about five decades to improve the oil production rate and recovery efficiency. Steam flooding is applied to heavy and extra-heavy oil reservoirs; however it could be used in light oil reservoirs in which water injection do not work effectively. Regardless of different performances, this method is an efficient EOR process for both heavy and light oil reservoirs. In this work, two separate numerical models were prepared to investigate steam flooding performance for the recovery of light... 

The coning phenomenon usually occurs in water and gas cap drive reservoirs. Water coning in Iranian hydrocarbon reservoirs is one of the most important problems that affects the cumulative production, operation costs and causes environmental problems. Before producing from a reservoir, its fluids are in equilibrium and their contact surfaces remain unchanged, but after starting production from the reservoir, when the viscous force overcome gravitational force in vertical direction, contact surfaces will displace and coning will occur. So, the production rates will be controlled in a range that prevents entering water and gas to the production well. For this reason, investigation and modeling... 

Although alkaline-surfactant-polymer flooding is proved to be efficient for oil recovery from heavy oil reservoirs, the displacements mechanism/efficiency of this process in fractured systems needs to more discussion, especially in five-spot patterns. In this work, several ASP flooding test were performed on fractured micromodels which were initially saturated with heavy oil at constant flow rate and different fracture geometrical characteristics conditions. The ASP solutions are constituted from 5 polymers i.e. four synthetic polymers include three hydrolyzed polyacrylamide with different molecular weight as well as a non-hydrolyzed polyacrylamide and a biopolymer, 2 surfactants i.e. a... 

As many fields around the world are reaching maturity, the need to develop new tools that allows reservoir engineering to optimize reservoir performance is becoming more demanding. One of the more challenging and influential problems along these lines is the well placement optimization problem. Determining of the location of new wells is a complex problem that depends on reservoir and fluid properties, well and surface equipment specifications, and economic criteria. Various approaches have been proposed for this problem. Among those, direct optimization using the simulator as the evaluation function, although accurate, is in most cases infeasible due to the number of simulations required.... 

This paper summarizes the possibility of carbon dioxide gas Injection and compares the results with natural depletion in one of Iranian under saturated oil reservoir. At first with using PVTi software and Eclipse simulator, slim tube test has been simulated and Minimum Miscibility Pressure (MMP) of carbon dioxide gas with reservoir fluid determined then simulation of CO2 injection had done and at the end assessment of economic conditions for CO2 injection had been considered. Results had shown CO2 is an optimized choice for gas injection in this oil reservoir  

This work concerns with experimental investigation of CO2 WAG injection to light crude oil in near miscible conditions which has been rarely attended in the available literature. Here, several core flood experiments at three constant injection rates and four WAG ratios are conducted on sandstone rocks saturated with light crude oil in presence of saline water. The results showed that higher injection rate has a better performance regarding oil recovery for smaller PVs of injected fluids, while lower injection rate showed higher ultimate recovery for a 30% increase in injected PVs. Secondary continuous gas injection showed a superior performance than all the other WAG injections in different... 

In this work effect of composition changes of injection gas, CH4 + CO2, on the performance of immiscible WAG injection in light oil, 41 oAPI, which has been rarely attended in the available literature is investigated. Presence of CO2 helps to reduce the MMP of CH4 significantly. Core flood experiments are conducted at reservoir conditions and fixed flow rate of 0.5cc/min on a sandstone sample with the brine concentration of 5000 ppm, and the influence of injection gas composition as well as WAG ratio on oil recovery is investigated. Different mole percents of methane in mixture, 0%, to 100% are examined, and the tests continued to ten alternate cycles with a slug size of 0.1 pore volumes and... 

Asphaltene precipitation during natural depletion and miscible gas injection is a common problem in oilfields throughout the world. In this work, static precipitation tests are conducted to investigate effect of pressure, temperature and gas type and concentration on asphaltene instability. Three different oil samples are studied under reservoir conditions with/without nitrogen and methane injection. Besides applying common thermodynamic models, a new scaling equation is presented to predict asphaltene precipitation under HPHT gas injection. Published data from literature are also used in model development. The scaling approach is attractive because it is simple and complex asphaltene... 

Asphaltene deposition causes serious problems in the oil industry. Variation of oil composition and reservoir pressure is reported to be the most important factors that influence asphaltene deposition from reservoir oil. In this study, a mathematical model was developed to simulate asphaltene deposition during primary depletion and CO2 injection. The main purpose of this study is to investigate and to compare asphaltene deposition mechanisms due to primary depletion and CO2 injection. The solid model as thermodynamic model was applied to investigate asphaltene precipitation. A numerical model was established to the governing equations both in space and time and model parameters were... 

Optimal well placement is a crucial step in efficient reservoir development process which significantly affects the productivity and economical benefits of an oil reservoir. However, it is a complex and challenging problem due to the different engineering, geological and economical variables involved. This leads to a very large number of potential scenarios that must be evaluated using numerical reservoir simulations. The key points in such an optimization process are using a fast function evaluation tool and development of an efficient and robust optimization algorithm that can find good solutions with a minimum required number of function evaluations. This study presents an approach that...