Sharif Digital Repository

Recent studies in nanotechnology field have shown this technology could solve many challenges and needs in oil and gas industry. As yet, many applications of nanoparticles in enhanced oil recovery have been reported. One of the most important applications is wettability alteration due to presence of nanoparticles in injecting fluid, which has recently been studied by several research groups. These studies indicate that, presence of nanoparticles in injecting water would improve oil recovery. However, there is no adequate information about the mechanisms affecting fluid flow in reservoir rock and its mathematical modeling.The aim of this project is to evaluate the effect of injection of... 

Foam injection for enhanced oil recovery is concerned by petroleum engineers because it decreases adverse effects of fingering and gravity segregation caused by the injected fluid .Obviously foam stability is an important factor in the efficiency of this process. So investigating it is an imperative. One of the ways that less studied and can improve foam stability is using of nanoparticles. In this project effect of nanoparticles on foam stability and displacement mechanism during foam flooding has been discussed.
Study consisted of two sets of experiments. In the first part, the static foam stability in the presence of silica nanoparticles has been investigated. Also influence of... 

Miscible displacement in fluid flowing through a porous medium plays an important role in many environmental and industrial applications; for instance, miscible displacements in enhanced oil recovery processes and pollutant spreading in groundwater. A large number of numerical approaches have been developed to solve the advection-dispersion equation that describes the behavior of miscible displacement in porous media. Most of these numerical models suffer from numerical dispersion. Random walk seems to be an effective method to overcome this problem especially in heterogeneous media. Here, a random walk model was developed and used for simulating miscible displacement in heterogeneous porous... 

Gas injection is one of the common methods for enhance oil recovery from oil reservoirs. At miscible injection condition, the efficiency of the process is majorly affected by the molecular diffusion coefficient of the gas in the oil. Therefore, the accurate value of this coefficient is an essential for applying in reservoir simulator. However, determination of this coefficient only is possible through experimental methods. In this study, pressure decay method was applied to determine the diffusion coefficient of nitrogen, methane and carbon dioxide gases in crude oil. The reasons for choosing this method are : accuracy in designing the experiment, covering a wide range of pressure... 

gas injection method is one of the common methods of EOR, which has a long history. In gas injection, molecular entry gas mixing is the controlling factor of oil play. Therefore, the exact value of this coefficient becomes an important requirement for the simulation and modeling of oil reservoirs, which can only be determined by laboratory consumption methods. In this research, the pressure decay method is used as a common laboratory method to determine the penetration coefficient of methane, nitrogen and gas enriched with intermediate compounds in crude oil of one of Iran's oil reservoirs. In most of the available records in the investigation of the mentioned gas diffusion coefficient in... 

Fractured reservoirs have allocated a significant portion of Iran's and the world's oil and gas reserves, underscoring the importance of predicting the performance of these reservoir types in the oil and gas industry. Predicting the performance of fractured reservoirs by professional reservoir simulators, especially in enhanced recovery conditions, requires precise information on fracture flow functions, which is often limited. These functions vary for each reservoir based on the distinct characteristics of the rock and fluid, and the only way to determine them is through appropriate laboratory experimentation and modeling of the results. Currently, in simulation models, the relative... 

Groundwater is one of the vital sources of drinking water worldwide, yet it faces the risk of contamination from organic and inorganic substances. These pollutants can persist in the environment for extended periods, leading to continuous contamination. One of the key factors in the rapid transport of these contaminants is the presence of fracture networks within porous media. These fractures play a crucial role in facilitating the movement of pollutants to deeper layers of groundwater aquifers. The fracture networks enable contaminants to migrate more rapidly and penetrate various regions, complicating pollution management. Additionally, the natural flow of groundwater acts as a driving... 

One the basic challenges during drilling of both vertical and horizontal wellbores is due to mud filtrate invasion into the formation. Addition of nanoparticles to composition of drilling fluid has been recognized as a measure of control and reduction of filtrate invasion. Despite notable advances in formulation of nano-enhanced drilling fluids, effects of surface wettability of nanoparticles on their performance have not been studied with any precision. Moreover, return permeability of a grain packed porous media after extreme invasion by mud filtrate has not been experimentally measured in a radial system, yet. The last but not least, Generation and development of mud cake opposite the... 

Using foam for reducing undesirable effects of fingering and gravity segregation in enhanced oil recovery through gas injection has attracted a rapidly increasing interest in recent years. Lack of stability of foam often limits its application. However there is a lack of systematic study of effects of unmodified and in-situ modified silica nano-particle on foam stability and foam behavior in the presence and absence of oil and also polymer effects from the prospective of analysis of foam dynamic stability, size of foam bubbles, and foam flow behavior in Hele – Shaw cell. Main objectives of this study are mechanistic investigation of effects of polymer – surfactant systems and in-situ... 

Formation damage in oil and gas wells is mainly induced by drilling operations. Filtrate and particle invasion into formation as the sources of this damage caused serious problems, e.g. reduction of production rates. Therefore numerical modeling of this phenomenon helps us to better understand the process, and as a result, control and reduce formation damage associated with this impairment. In this research, a model to estimate the invasion depth and damage of mud filtrate from water-based mud is presented. Filtrate invasion into the formation is investigated by convection-diffusion equation with regard to dispersion term. The invasion depth is obtained from mud filtrate profile in the... 

In this work, flow transport, distribution, and dissolution of non-aqueous phase liquids (NAPLs) in heterogeneous porous media were modeled by focusing on the dissolution process in pore-level and field scale. First, by adopting advection-diffusion and mass transfer equations, dissolution process and NAPL distribution were investigated in a heterogeneous porous media using pore network modeling. The 2-D developed model was based on observations of micromodel tests. The pore scale simulator which adopted by this work was improved in some aspects in comparison to previous models in the literatures. First, in the phase displacement, by considering more realistic geometries for pore structure... 

Gas injection as an enhanced oil recovery (EOR) method usually suffers from low recovery efficiency. The low viscosity and density of gas as well as reservoir heterogeneity are the main reasons of early breakthrough and override of gas in oil reservoirs. To mitigate the poor sweep efficiency of gas injection, surfactants can be co-injected or injected in an alternating manner with gas to form foam within the reservoir rock. The foam formation can reduce the mobility of the injection fluids in porous media. A significant challenge of foam injection is the stability of the foam in formations and the foam liquid drainage rate is one of the key factors which characterize or show the efficiency... 

Due to the fact that, over 60% of oil reserves are located in fractured reservoirs, this type of reservoirs requires a great deal of attention. The presence of the fractures in porous media results in many complexities in the liquid path and production, consequently, simulation and modeling of flow equations is highly important. In order to achieve a more profound understanding of liquid flow in gravity drainage mechanism, the concept of capillary tubes is initially used. By using the capillary tube concept, at first, the gravity drainage mechanism is investigated in the first block in a stack of blocks and an analytical solution is presented for this case. Then, the stack of blocks is... 

The behavior of two-phase flow in porous media is influenced by the flow functions. Especially in fractured porous media where the relative permeabilities of the phases in the fracture and matrix are different, the flow behavior is significantly affected by these functions. On the other hand, the properties of the fluid and the fracture, such as length, orientation, and roughness of the fracture, also play an important role in determining the values of relative permeabilities and, consequently, the behavior of two-phase flow. However, the influence of fracture geometric properties on the relative permeability curves in fractured porous media is not well understood. In this study, firstly, a... 

Most of oil content, especially in Iran, has been reserved in fractured reservoirs, so study and modeling of production mechanism of these reservoirs are great of importance. Gravity drainage is one of these effective production mechanisms in fractured porous media which dynamic pore scale modeling of this mechanism will lead to better understanding of it. In this work, the effects of variety of parameters such as oil gravity, interfacial tension between oil and gas, pore and throat size distribution, fracture aperture, and block to block interaction (capillary continuity and reinfiltartion) have been investigated. So developed simulator in this work has two main and separated parts, which... 

In the recent years, there has been an increasing attention toward usage of ultrasonic for enhanced oil recovery practices. But, thorough knowledge of active mechanisms and spreading and characterization of developed fingers during this practice is not available. From the other hand, due to limited amount of light oil fields, more attentions towards recovery from heavy oils is the need of the hour. Documents show that the big issues during the enhanced oil recovery from heavy crudes are high density of reservoir oil as well as poor development of fingers during injection due to high mobility ratios. In this study, results of ultrasound effect on the heavy oil recovery and its effect on the... 

Pipe freezing has become well established in industry as a method of short-termisolation in order to carry out maintenance or repairs. It is often necessary to repair system components without plant shutdown or drainage of system having many piping structures which may have hazardous or expensive fluid. Therefore, a series of tests has been arranged to investigate the ice plug formation in two standard pipes with different diameter size. The freeze zone on the pipe has been created by means of an aluminum jacket which liquid nitrogen flows in it. In the tests the freezing time, amount of liquid nitrogen usage andthe pressure tolerance of ice plug have been determined. Moreover, the numerical... 

Natural fractured reservoirs are of significant importance in global oil production, and one of the production mechanisms from these reservoirs is gravity drainage. Previous research has focused on understanding the factors determining oil recovery from blocks during gravity drainage, such as fracture aperture, block angle, stability, and the number of liquid bridges formed at various angles, as well as the effect of injection rate. However, the results from these studies have not been sufficiently consistent and have shown ambiguities in the influence of the mentioned parameters on the dynamic discharge of oil from the matrix block during gravity drainage. These ambiguities highlight the... 

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...