Sharif Digital Repository

Tortuosity and cementation factor are two critical parameters that significantly affect estimates of reservoir properties. Tortuosity factor can be used to estimate permeability using the Carman-Kozeny equation and is an important parameter for formation resistivity factor calculation using a modified version of Archie's formula. It is also used to predict water saturation of reservoir rocks. Tortuosity as an input parameter in Biot's equation can be used to estimate velocity dispersion. In this work, based on the Generalized Archie Equation Curve Fitting (GAECF), tortuosity and cementation factor are determined for selected intervals in a carbonate reservoir. Formation resistivity factor... 

Coarse grid generation from finely gridded geological model is a main step in reservoir simulation. Coarse grid generation algorithms aim at optimizing size, number and location of the grid blocks by identifying the important geological and flow features which control flow in porous media. By optimizing coarse grid structure we can improve accuracy of the coarse scale simulation results to reproduce fine grid behavior. A number of techniques have been proposed in the literature. We present a novel coarse grid generation procedure based on vorticity preservation between fine and coarse grids. In the procedure, the coarse grid mesh tries to capture variations in both permeability and fluid... 

Rock samples from the Asmary outcrop formation of the Ahwaz oil rich zone with a porosity of 16% and permeability of 1 md and MIS crude oil with an API value of 42.5 and moderate asphaltene content of 3%, were used to study the effect of the incubation time and flow rate of the displacing fluid in MEOR operations. Five species of rod shaped, gram positive, thermophile and facultative bacteria were isolated and purified from the crude. Due to the high sweep efficiency prevailing in the core flooding system, the effect of the displacing brine flow rate on the oil recovery efficiency was found not to be significant. On the other hand, a 100% increase in incubation time from 7 to 14 days... 

Oil and gas are likely the most important sources for producing heat and energy in both domestic and industrial applications. Hydrocarbon reservoirs that contain these fuels are required to be characterized to exploit the maximum amount of their fluids. Well testing analysis is a valuable tool for the characterization of hydrocarbon reservoirs. Handling and analysis of long-term and noise-contaminated well testing signals using the traditional methods is a challenging task. Therefore, in this study, a novel paradigm that combines wavelet transform (WT) and recurrent neural networks (RNN) is proposed for analyzing the long-term well testing signals. The WT not only reduces the dimension of... 

Increasing the permeability of hydrocarbon reservoirs by creating artificial cracks that are induced by injection of fluids under high pressure is called hydraulic fracturing (HF). This method is widely used in petroleum reservoir engineering. For design of Hydraulic Fracture operations, several analytical models have been developed. KGD and PKN are the first and most used analytical models in this area. Although number of advanced softwares are developed in recent years, KGD and PKN models are still popular and have even been used in a number of softwares. In both models the characteristics of the fracture namely: fracture length (L), fracture width (w), and fluid pressure at the crack... 

Image logs provide useful information for fracture study in naturally fractured reservoir. Fracture dip, azimuth, aperture and fracture density can be obtained from image logs and have great importance in naturally fractured reservoir characterization. Imaging all fractured parts of hydrocarbon reservoirs and interpreting the results is expensive and time consuming. In this study, an improved method to make a quantitative correlation between fracture densities obtained from image logs and conventional well log data by integration of different artificial intelligence systems was proposed. The proposed method combines the results of Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) and Neural... 

Microbial enhanced oil recovery (MEOR) process is divided into two main categories, namely in-situ and ex-situ techniques. It utilizes reservoir microorganisms or specially selected bacteria to use their metabolites for more oil recovery from depleted oil reservoirs. In the present study, the potential of two biosurfactant-producing strains of Enterobacter cloacae and Bacillus stearothermophilus SUCPM#14 were investigated on tertiary oil recovery efficiency in carbonated cores using different designed injection protocols. The required operational time, process cost and proper selection of bacterial formulation during the MEOR process were the main objectives of this study. The results of... 

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... 

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... 

Most of the reported robust and non-robust optimization works are formulated based on a single-objective optimization, commonly in terms of net present value. However, variation of economical parameters such as oil price and costs forces such high computational optimization works to regenerate their optimum water injection policies. Furthermore, dynamic optimization strategies of water-flooding often lack robustness to geological uncertainties. This paper presents a multi-objective while robust optimization methodology by incorporating three dedicated objective functions. The goal is to determine optimized and robust water injection policies for all injection wells. It focuses on reducing... 

Since the beginning of industrial age the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases has been increased significantly due to excessive use of fossil fuels. An effective way for decreasing emission of greenhouse gases is injection of CO2 in geological formations. Moreover, from the reservoir engineering point of view, CO2 injection has been considered as a method of enhancing oil and gas recovery. While using CO2 for enhanced oil recovery (EOR) has been the subject of several studies in the past decades, enhanced gas recovery (EGR) has not been fully studied in the gas reservoirs, mainly because of high recovery factor of gas reservoirs and mixing of the reservoir gas and CO2. In this... 

Complicated sedimentary processes control the spatial distribution of geological heterogeneities. This serves to make the nature of the fluid flow in the hydrocarbon reservoirs immensely complex. Proper modeling of these heterogeneities and evaluation of their connectivity are crucial and affects all aspects of fluid flow. Since the natural variability of heterogeneity occurs in a myriad of length scales, accurate modeling of the rock type connectivity requires a very fine scheme, which is computationally very expensive. Hence, this makes other alternative methods such as the percolation approach attractive and necessary. The percolation approach considers the hypothesis that a reservoir can... 

This paper investigates the efficiency and performance of several of the fiooding techniques popular in secondary and enhanced oil recovery. These processes include water fiooding, immiscible and miscible gas fiooding, and several forms of water-alternating-gas (WAG) injection. The study is carried out numerically on a typical one-dimensional domain using an advanced high-resolution central scheme. Some performance indices such as oil cut drop, breakthrough time, and sweep efficiency were employed to evaluate the appropriateness of each injection strategy  

Relative permeability curves have practical implications in petroleum reservoir simulations. Study of the effects of reservoir wettability, pore shape geometry, and viscosity ratio of flowing fluids on the relative permeabilities is of great importance in reservoir modeling. In this paper, lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) is employed for analyzing the two-fluid flow in rigid porous media. The developed LBM code proved to be a robust numerical tool for analyzing the factors that influence the relative permeabilities of two immiscible fluids flowing through porous media. The numerically derived relative permeability curves demonstrate that in neutrally wet reservoirs, the effect of viscosity... 

Recently production optimization has gained increasing interest in the petroleum industry. The most computationally expensive part of the production optimization process is the evaluation of the objective function performed by a numerical reservoir simulator. Employing surrogate models (a.k.a. proxy models) as a substitute for the reservoir simulator is proposed for alleviating this high computational cost.In this study, a novel approach for constructing adaptive surrogate models with application in production optimization problem is proposed. A dynamic Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) is employed as the approximation function while the training is performed using an adaptive sampling... 

The discrete fracture network (DFN) and Multiple-Continua concept are among the most widely used methods to model naturally fractured reservoirs. Each faces specific limitations. The recently introduced recovery curve method (RCM) is believed to be a compromise between these two current methods. In this method the recovery curves are used to determine the amount of mass exchanges between the matrix and fracture mediums. Two recovery curves are assigned for each simulation cell, one curve for gas displacement in the presence of the gravity drainage mechanism, and another for water displacement in the case of the occurrence of the imbibition mechanism. These curves describe matrix-fracture... 

A comprehensive understanding of the role of reservoir heterogeneities induced by flow barriers and connate water on sweep efficiency of different EOR scenarios is rarely attended in the available literature. In this work, different miscible/immiscible EOR processes were conducted on various one-quarter five-spot glass micromodels incorporating small-scale flow barriers. Microscopic and macroscopic observations revealed the reduction of sweep efficiency, premature breakthrough of displacing fluids, the severity of fingering at displacement front which leaves a large amount of oil behind the flow barriers untouched, and significant increasing trend of oil recovery after breakthrough in the... 

In fractured oil reservoirs, the gravity drainage mechanism has great potentials to higher oil recovery in comparison with other mechanisms. Recently, the forced gravity drainage assisted by gas injection has also been considered; however, there are few comprehensive studies in the literature. Dual porosity model, the most common approach for simulation of fractured reservoirs, uses transfer function concept to represent the fluid exchange between matrix and its neighborhood fractures. This study compares the results of different available transfer functions with those of fine grid simulations when forced gravity drainage contributes to oil production from a single matrix block. These... 

Anisotropy and heterogeneity in reservoir properties introduce challenges during the development of hydrocarbon reservoirs in naturally fractured reservoirs. In reservoir simulations, grid-block properties are frequently assigned to obtain reasonable history matches. Even then, accuracy with regard to some aspects of the performance such as water or gas cuts, breakthrough times, and sweep efficiencies may be inadequate. In some cases, this could be caused by the presence of substantial flow through natural fractures. In this work the fracture characterization and modeling was performed in a highly fractured carbonate reservoir in SW Iran. It was observed that reservoir simulation based on... 

A novel technique for upscaling of detailed geological reservoir descriptions is presented. The technique aims at reducing both numerical dispersion and homogenization error generated due to incorporating a coarse computational grid and assigning effective permeability to coarse-grid blocks, respectively. In particular, we consider implicit-pressure explicit-saturation scheme where homogenization error impacts the accuracy of the coarse-grid solution of the pressure equation. To reduce the homogenization error, we employ the new vorticity-based gridding that generates a non-uniform coarse grid with high resolution at high vorticity zones. In addition, to control numerical dispersion, we use...