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Streaming potential measurement is one of the electrokinetic techniques used to determine the average zeta potential of porous rock which can provide reliable information on reservoir flow behavior and wettability state of the rock surface. Streaming potential measurement using electrodes has recently been introduced in the oil reservoirs applications and there are still significant uncertainties during the measurements and interpretation of streaming potential results. The primary purpose of this work is to establish a setup to measure the streaming potential of porous media with low scattering and evaluate voltage measurements based on the paired stabilization and pressure ramping methods.... 

Volumetric and equilibrium calculations for the natural gas and oil defined by a large number of components are not feasible in applications like compositional reservoir simulation. Therefore, the fluid mixture is grouped to reduce computational load and to make faster calculations. However, for several reasons, it is required to have the detailed fluid composition rather than the lumped one. In this work, an improved delumping method is presented to retrieve the phase composition of the detailed mixture based on the grouped mixture thermodynamic calculations. The method is based on previously proposed delumping techniques for non-cubic equation of state (Assareh et al. in Fluid Phase... 

Classic identifiability analysis of flow barriers in incompressible single-phase flow reveals that it is not possible to identify the location and permeability of low-permeability barriers from production data (wellbore pressures and rates), and that only averaged reservoir properties in between wells can be identified. We extend the classic analysis by including compressibility effects. We use two approaches: a twin experiment with synthetic production data for use with a time-domain parameter-estimation technique, and a transfer-function formalism in the form of bilaterally coupled four-ports allowing for an analysis in the frequency domain. We investigate the identifiability, from noisy... 

In this work, PC-SAFT, an equation of state based on perturbation theory, is applied to predict the reservoir fluids phase behavior. PC-SAFT parameters for pure components have previously been assessed, but they cannot be determined for petroleum fractions with unspecified components and composition. In order to remove this difficulty and making use of PC-SAFT model in the reservoir fluids simulations, a new approach is studied which leads to appearing generalized correlations for the estimation of PC-SAFT parameters for petroleum cuts and plus fractions using only their molecular weight and specific gravity, without the essential need for the characterization of petroleum fractions in... 

In the present paper we investigate the problem of water propagation in 2 dimensional (2D) petroleum reservoir in which each site has the probability p of being occupied. We first analyze this propagation pattern described by Darcy equations by focusing on its geometrical features. We find that the domain-walls of this model at p=pc ≃ 0.59 are Schramm-Loewner evolution (SLE) curves with κ=3.05 ∓ 0.1 consistent with the Ising universality class. We also numerically show that the fractal dimension of these domain-walls at p=pc is Df ≃ 1.38 consistent with SLEκ=3. Along with this analysis, we introduce a self-organized critical (SOC) model in which the water movement is modeled by a chain of... 

The impacts of salinity adjustment of displacing fluid have recently gained special attention to enhanced oil recovery (EOR). Different mechanisms have been studied widely in the literature while some of them are still subjugated to more scrutiny. The effects of diluted sea water on the interfacial properties of brine and asphaltenic-acidic crude oil and the wettability alteration of carbonate reservoir rock are investigated in this experimental observational work. The measurements of interfacial tension (IFT) and contact angle (CA) as two main parameters are studied. Besides, the effects of asphaltene and resin in the crude oil on the IFT values between the crude oil and aqueous solution... 

Thermal recovery by steam injection has proven to be an effective means of recovering heavy oil. Forecasts of reservoir response to the application of steam are necessary before starting a steam drive project. Thermal numerical models are available to provide forecasts. However, these models are expensive and consume a great deal of computer time. An alternative to numerical modeling is to use a semi-analytical model. The objective of the current study was to investigate thermal applications of horizontal wells for displacement and gravity drainage processes using analytical modeling as well as reservoir simulation. The main novelties presented in the paper are: a) the transient temperature... 

Water-in-oil emulsion usually forms during waterflooding in some heavy oil reservoirs. The composition and salinity of the injected water critically affect the w/o emulsion droplet size distribution, which control the emulsion stability and emulsion flow in porous media. The aim of the present work is to assess the effect of different sea water salinities on w/o emulsion stability through microscopic imaging. Therefore, w/o emulsions were prepared with different sea water samples, which were synthesized to resemble Persian Gulf, Mediterranean, Red Sea, and North Sea water samples. The results showed that log-normal distribution function predicts very well the experimental data to track the... 

Although several investigations have studied the low-salinity water injection (LSWI) performance during the past decades, the effect of crude oil type on the interfacial tension (IFT) and wettability alteration is still in dark. In this regard, this study is aimed to obtain the thermodynamic energies including adhesion, cohesion and spreading coefficient during LSWI. To achieve this goal, IFT and static contact angle values of three different crude oils (i.e. light, medium and heavy) are measured as a function of sea water salinity. The obtained results revealed that the dilution of sea water can change the wettability of reservoir rock from oil wet state towards water wet state, while crude... 

Enhanced oil recovery (EOR) methods assisted by gravity drainage mechanism and application of sophisticated horizontal wells bring new hope for heavy oil extraction. Variety of thermal and non-thermal EOR techniques inject an external source of energy and materials such as steam, solvent vapor, or gas through a horizontal well at the top of the reservoir to reduce in-situ heavy oil viscosity. So, the diluted oil becomes mobile and flows downwards by gravity drainage to a horizontal producer located at the bottom of the reservoir. In this paper, a sector model of an Iranian fractured carbonate heavy oil reservoir was provided to simulate and evaluate capability of some EOR techniques such as... 

Carbonated water has been recently proposed as an enhanced oil recovery method for crude oil reservoirs. Interfacial tension (IFT) plays a crucial rule on the displacement of trapped oil ganglia in the porous media. This investigation is designed to systematically assess the dynamic interfacial tension (DIFT) of two different types of crude oils with carbonated water (CW). In addition, the measured experimental data were applied into specified models. The DIFT behavior of acidic and non-acidic crude oil samples/CW and deionized water (DW) are also compared to find the effect of dissolved carbon dioxide in water on IFT. At the next stage, DIFT of all the results were used through three... 

In this work, hybrid of silica nanoparticles (NPs) with sulfonated copolymer has been prepared in order to improve the copolymer properties for Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR). Some tests are done to find the effectiveness of injecting fluid on Recovery Factor (RF), such as Contact Angle (CA), interfacial tension (IFT), inherent viscosity, and eventually Micro-Model (MM) flooding. In CA test, wettability alteration from Oil-Wet (OW) to Water-Wet (WW) is reached by sedimentation and adsorption of NPs on the rock slice. In addition, IFT reduction is obtained by increasing the NaCl concentration. The viscosity change is investigated for the hybrid and copolymer under simulated high-temperature oil... 

Relative permeability curves of two-phase flow in a fracture have been a subject of study in recent years. The importance of these curves have been widely observed in multidisciplines, such as water subsurface resources, geothermal energy and underground hydrocarbon resources, especially fractured oil and gas reservoirs. Extensive experimental studies have been cited alongside the numerical studies in this area. However, simple analytical and practical solutions are still attractive. In the current study, wettability effects and phase interference explicitly were tried to be implemented in a simple analytical formula. The wettability effects are represented by residual saturations which... 

Diffusivity equation which can provide us with the pressure distribution, is a Partial Differential Equation (PDE) describing fluid flow in porous media. The quadratic pressure gradient term in the diffusivity equation is nearly neglected in hydrology and petroleum engineering problems such as well test analysis. When a compressible liquid is injected into a well at high pressure gradient or when the reservoir possess a small permeability value, the effect of ignoring this term increases. In such cases, neglecting this parameter can result in high errors. Previous models basically focused on numerical and semi-analytical methods for semi-infinite domain. To the best of our knowledge, no... 

Changing the wettability of reservoir rock towards strongly water-wet state is effective way to enhance oil recovery from fractured carbonate reservoirs which are typically oil-wet. Regarding this fact, the injection of surfactant and the bacterial solution as EOR agents is proposed in the current work as a potential method to alter the wettability of rock surface reservoir. Nevertheless, there is a definite lack of experimental data regarding this method and the synergistic effect of both chemical and bacterial solutions on this process. In this study, the sole and combined effects of the bacterial solution using an Enterobacter cloacae strain as a biosurfactant-producer are compared with... 

The wetting condition of the reservoir rock is the key to the success of any EOR technique and the ultimate oil recovery. Wettability is dictated by the surface chemistry related to the interactions between the fluids and the rock surface which determines the stability of the water film between the rock and the oil phase. Streaming potential measurement is one of the electrokinetic techniques used to determine the average zeta potential of porous rock which can provide reliable information on fluid-rock interaction and wettability state of the rock surface. Streaming potential measurement has recently been introduced in the oil reservoirs applications and there are still significant... 

A sequential implicit numerical method based on discrete-fracture model and the Galerkin Finite Element method, for time-dependent coupled fluid flow and geomechanics problems in fractured subsurface formations is presented. Discrete-fracture model has been used to explicitly represent the fracture network inside porous media. The Galerkin Finite Element method with adaptive unstructured gridding is implemented to numerically solve the spatially three-dimensional and time-dependent problem. The presented method is validated with previously obtained solutions. Two problems are numerically solved by applying the presented methodology in a three-dimensional fractured petroleum reservoir under...