Sharif Digital Repository

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... 

MPD technique manages drilling pressure to keep bottom hole Pressure balanced in the well. The objective to this studs, is to approximate the well pressure to formation pressure to prevent entry of fluid into the well. MPD is a new method drilling in which, driller controls the annulus pressure in order prevent drilling problems. the circulating fluids system employed by MPD technology is more akin to that of a pressure vessel. In this thesis, using in laboratory-made machine, reacts with sudden changes in pressure at the bottom hole in the shortest possible time. Basically, this system is a system where well bore pressure management is obtained by adjusting the pressures along the well bore... 

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.... 

Most of the Iranian oil reservoirs are reaching end of their natural production life, hence they are suitable candidates for EOR common processes like gas injection and WAG injection. Studies have shown that gas and WAG injection can be applied for optimal oil production. Past studies have been mainly on gas and WAG injection in immiscible or fully miscible conditions and there is a limited amount of data available on performance of these methods in near miscible conditions. Miscible injection is not feasible in old Iranian oil reservoirs due to their depleted pressure. Moreover injection in lower pressures is attractive from both economical and operational standpoints since this reduces the... 

Two phase flow through porous media is one of great interests which have been studied for decades in petroleum sciences and even other fields, e.g. hydrology and physics, to solve problems such as enhanced oil recovery, contaminated groundwater or CO2 sequestration projects. Flow in porous media typically predict by means of Darcy’ law which in two phase flow lead to equations such as Buckley-Leverett or Koval, but today it is well approved that compact prediction of flow pattern by these equations may be accompanied by enormous errors and it’s because flow in certain condition is fractal. In this work a new mechanistic model has been used for simulating of immiscible drainage process and... 

Chemical flooding such as surfactant flooding in oil reservoirs can change the wettability and interfacial tension between oil and water and so reduce the residual oil saturation in the reservoir. Some of these materials can be adsorbed a lot on the surface of carbonate rocks, so it is difficult to predict the oil recovery factor in such process. Therefore it is necessary to survey the adsorption amount of surfactants in chemical EOR injections.In this thesis, the adsorption of a nonionic surfactant on the surface of carbonate rock is experimented and the proper model is obtained. Then the surfactant is injected in a core saturated with oil to observe the efficiency of this surfactant in... 

Scale deposition is one of the reasons of formation damage during water injection process. This phenomenon often ocuures when two incompatible waters that interact chemically and precipitate minerals, mix within the reservoir. A typical example is sea water, with high concentration of sulfate ion and formation water, with high concentrations of calcium and/or barium ions. Mixing of these waters, therefore, can cause precipitation of calcium sulfate and/or barium sulfate. This study was conducted to investigate the permeability reduction caused by deposition of calcium and barium sulfates in carbonate cores from mixing of injected sea water and formation water in two flow rates and two... 

In this study, single-phase and two-phase, incompressible flow in a non-deformable porous media was modeled and also simulated. The Reynolds numbers have been considered high enough to justify the use of the model including inertial terms. Afterwards, the mass conservative equations were discretized. Then, the numerical model has been developed for heterogeneous porous media. The heterogeneous porous media was comprised by several specified homogeneous regions, each having isotropic transport properties or permeability distribution with applying stochastic methods. The developed numerical model was used for predicting of saturation profile in water flooding process in one, two and... 

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... 

The production of oil is challenging in the fractured reservoirs due to the large transmissibility contrast between matrix and fracture, and primary recovery is often low. The recovery efficiency depends on the relationship between the fracture and matrix permeability, and is strongly dependent on the wettability of the matrix, which reflects the imbibition potential of the reservoir. Among these parameters the multiphase fluid flow in gas invaded zone is the point of interest in this project. Gas injection in naturally fractured reservoirs maintains the reservoir pressure, and increases oil recovery primarily by gravity drainage and to a lesser extent by mass transfer between the flowing... 

At the early stages of production, oil reservoirs may have enough energy to push the oil from the reservoir into the wellbore and subsequently from the wellbore to the surface. When the reservoir energy is too low for the well to flow, or the production rate desired is greater than the reservoir energy can deliver, using some kind of artificial lift method to provide the energy to bring the fluid to the surface, seems to be necessary. Continuous flow gas lift is one of the most common artificial lift methods widely used in the oil industry during which, at appropriate pressure, gas is injected in a suitable depth into the tubing to gasify the oil column, and thus assist the production. Each... 

Liquid flow between two porous blocks in fractured reservoirs can occur through capillary continuity or re-imbibition. Studies have shown that capillary continuity via liquid bridges formed in horizontal fracture increases oil recovery from reservoirs. The critical fracture apertures for stability of liquid bridges, shape of curvature and fracture capillary pressure for prediction of fractured reservoir performance remain as controversial topics. Experimental results have shown that critical fracture aperture is a function of surface wettability and critical Bond number. Capillary pressure of fracture might be a positive or negative value caused by liquid bridges. The best method for... 

Fractured reservoirs constitute a major portion of world’s petroleum reservoirs. Gravity drainage is the controlling production mechanism in these reservoirs. Thus, investigation of performance and oil production in fractured models has been the subject of many researches. Despite the considerable number of experimental and modeling studies in this area, the method of scale-up in single or multi block models is not broadly investigated. This work is divided into two experimental and modeling sections. For the experimental study, free fall gravity drainage experiments in synthetic single or multi block porous media were performed in order to investigate effects of different parameters... 

According to the reported field experiences, excess water production from high permeable thief zones of oil reservoirs is the main source of severe operational problems and economic issues. Application of Preformed Particle Gels (PPGs) is an effective technique to overcome this problem. Static test analysis is a primary method for evaluating the performance of PPGs material at different conditions of pH, salinity, etc. However, the effect of the presence of oil and rock on the kinetics of swelling/de-swelling of PPGs is not well understood. Also, considering the vast field application of Co_2-based oil recovery methods, it is interesting to study the effect of carbon dioxide gas on swelling... 

Water injection is one of the main methods of enhanced oil recovery that its success depends on exact study of main effective parameters. Saturation functions including relative permeability function and capillary pressure function are one of the effective parameters on the success of water injection projects. In many reservoirs there is wide heterogeneity and various layering that have different absolute permeability. These features result in uncertainty to measurement of curves of saturation function. Experimental studies on this field are carried out on the composite cores that show heterogeneity and layering media of reservoir. By Scaling up the saturation functions from single cores to... 

In this work, a pore-scale analysis of nonaqueous phase liquid (NAPL) flow, transport, dissolution, and mobilization in heterogeneous and homogeneous porous media was presented. First, dissolution processes and distribution of NAPL phase were investigated using micromodel experiments. The tests were conducted at different injection rates in NAPL-saturated porous media using distilled water, surfactant, and nanoparticles-assisted surfactant. Changes in residual NAPL volume and interfacial area were measured using image analysis method to calculate the mass transfer coefficient, k, and the lumped mass transfer rate coefficient, K. Based on the experimental results, empirical Sherwood... 

Drilling of low pressure layers is one of the major problems in petroleum industry, in which requires a lightweight drilling fluid for drilling of these layers. Use of lightweight Colloidal Gas Aphron (CGA) leads to loss reduction of drilling fluid, decreases formation damage and finally, well stimulation costs will be reduced. Use of nanoparticles can improve the aphron drilling fluid performance. But there is little information in the literature about the role of natural surfactant in the presence of nanoparticles on the CGA based fluid properties. Especially, micro bubbles behavior in the presence of nanoparticles in pore scale is less considered. This study consists of two parts, in the... 

One of the most important EOR methods in oil reservoirs is surfactant and polymer flooding. Surfactants cause decreasing in interfacial tension between oleic and aqueous phases. However, polymers give us efficient mobility control in displacing oil by increasing the viscosity of aqueous phase. Therefore, oil is displaced in aqueous phase by viscous forces.
One of the most important challenges in surfactant flooding is adsorption. The net surface charge distributed on the rock surface depends strongly on pH. When we inject surfactant in reservoir, electrostatic charge on rock surface causes the first-layer adsorption. After that we have had second-layer adsorption.
In this thesis we... 

Oil reservoir Protection and production optimization requires the proper use of EOR methods. One of the conventional methods of EOR is chemical flooding (for example polymer, alkaline – Polymer, Nano - Polymer and Alkaline - Nano – Polymer flooding) which used for controlling mobility ratio of fluid within a reservoir, altering surface tension between fluids, and change reservoir wettability. On the other hand prediction of oil production in reservoirs during chemical injection processis impossible without having two-phase relative permeability functions and meanwhile, data from the experimental results of these functions are limited.In this study, effect of polymer type and concentration in... 

In this research we aim to find enhance oil recovery mechanisms involved in nano-bio material injection by micro model apparatus which has not been studied before. Especially for injection in heavy oil and shaly porous media that forms most of heavy oil reservoirs. To this end, microscopic images from injection of nano-bio materials to shaly patterns have been taken and analyzed to find the process mechanism. Also amount of enhance oil recovery in different conditions like type of microbe forming bio material, nano-bio material concentration and type of flow pattern (shale characteristics including length, direction and distance from injection and production wells) will be studied.Three...