Foam mobility control

Final laboratory testing of CO2 foam was performed in Shell s CT facility (11-12L Tertiary miscible and immiscible CO2 corefloods, with and without foam mobility control, were scanned during flow at reservoir conditions. The cores were horizontally mounted continuous cylinders of Berea sandstone. Table I lists pertinent core and fluid data. 

Although not pointed out in the test, it may be observed from the data that there is some effect on mobility of velocity or total flow rate. Some shear thinning or pseudoplastic behavior has been observed under certain conditions. This is, of course, the more favorable of possible non-Newtonian behaviors for foam mobility control, since it would mean that less thickening occurred in the vicinity of the injection well, than further out in the formation. 

Hirasaki, G.J., Miller, C.A., Pope, G.A., 2006. Surfactant based enhanced oil recovery and foam mobility control. 3 Annual Final Technical Report for DOE project (DE-FC26-03NT15406, July. 

If a C02 flood is already underway, then the initiation of C02-foam mobility control will cause changes in the injection schedule. Because in many cases C02 is the major adjustable operating expense, this alone may call for an increase in rate of outlay. On the other hand, industry experience has shown that other things being equal, the rate of oil production is proportional to the rate of injection of C02, which would be greater by a factor of 2—3 in a high-C02-fraction foam flood over a 2 1 WAG flood. Consequently, this cost increase can be expected to be matched quickly by increasing production. 

T. Zhu, A. Strycker, C. J. Raible, and K. Vineyard. Foams for mobility control and improved sweep efficiency in gas flooding. In Proceedings Volume, volume 2, pages 277-286.11th SPE/DOE Impr Oil Recovery Symp (Tulsa, OK, 4/19-4/22), 1998. 

Recent research and field tests have focused on the use of relatively low concentrations or volumes of chemicals as additives to other oil recovery processes. Of particular interest is the use of surfactants as CO (184) and steam mobility control agents (foam). Also combinations of older EOR processes such as surfactant enhanced alkaline flooding and alkaline-surfactant-polymer flooding have been the subjects of recent interest. Older technologies polymer flooding (185,186) and micellar flooding (187-189) have been the subject of recent reviews. In 1988 84 commercial products polymers, surfactants, and other additives, were listed as being marketed by 19 companies for various enhanced oil recovery applications (190). 

In addition to the mobility control characteristics of the surfactants, critical issues in gas mobility control processes are surfactant salinity tolerance, hydrolytic stability under reservoir conditions, and surfactant propagation. Lignosulfonate has been reported to increase foam stability and function as a sacrificial adsorption agent (392). The addition of sodium carbonate or sodium bicarbonate to the surfactant solution reduces surfactant adsorption by increasing the aqueous phase pH (393). 

The primary factor controlling how much gas is in the form of discontinuous bubbles is the lamellae stability. As lamellae rupture, the bubble size or texture increases. Indeed, if bubble coalescence is very rapid, then most all of the gas phase will be continuous and the effectiveness of foam as a mobility-control fluid will be lost. This paper addresses the fundamental mechanisms underlying foam stability in oil-free porous media. 

Foam is a promising fluid for achieving mobility control in underground enhanced oil recovery (1-3). Widespread application of this technology to, for example, steam, CO, enriched... 

Steam-foaming agents, in mobility control, 73 627-628 Steam gasification defined, 6 829 Steam-generating systems... 

Acid-in-oil emulsion can extend the propagation of acid considerable distances into a reservoir because the continuous (oil) phase prevents or minimizes contact between the acid and the rock [4,678,689]. Emulsification also increases viscosity and will improve the distribution of the acid in layered and heterogeneous reservoirs. Acidizing foams are aqueous, in which the continuous phase is usually hydrochloric acid (carbonate reservoirs) or hydrofluoric acid (sandstone reservoirs), or a blend, together with suitable surfactants and other stabilizers [345,659]. Foaming an acidizing fluid increases its effective viscosity, providing mobility control when it is injected [678]. 

K. Hodgins, L. Scale-Up Evaluations and Simulations of Mobility Control Foams for Improved Oil Recovery in Surfactants, Fundamentals and Applications in the Petroleum Industry, Schramm, L.L. (Ed.), Cambridge University Press Cambridge, 2000, pp. 251— 292. 

To control features of the flow itself (examples include drag reduction by addition of polymer or microbubbles, magnetic stabilization of fluidized beds, foam flow in porous media for mobility control, antimisting or cavitation suppression via polymer additives) and, finally,... 

In most applications of CO2 as an oil recovery agent, the CO2 exists as a supercritical fluid above its critical pressure (7.4 MPa) and temperature (32°C), while its solutions in oil are liquids (5). Hence, the dispersion types of most direct interest are supercritical-fluid-in-a-liquid (for which no specific name yet exists) and emulsions of oleic-in-aqueous liquids (which may be encountered at low CO2 saturations). However, for historical reasons (described below), all dispersions used in research on gas-flood mobility control are sometimes called "foams," even when they are known to be of another type. 

Mast, in a pioneering 1972 paper, reported visual observations of foam flow in etched glass micromodels (37 ) His observations showed that some of the conflicting claims about the properties of foam flow in porous media were probably due simply to the dominance of different mechanisms under the various conditions employed by the separate researchers (37). Mast observed most of the various mechanisms of dispersion formation, flow, and breakdown that are now believed to control the sweep control properties of surfactant-based mobility control (37,39-41). 

Figure 11, which is based on the phase behavior of surfactant/ oil/water systems, illustrates just a few of the many different patterns of phase behavior that may be encountered. On the left is a simple, "well-behaved" system, such as is implicitly assumed in most mobility control studies on "foams." Barring unforeseen wettability problems, the system can be expected to form a "C02 in-water foam."... 

Surfactant foaming properties are related to oil phase composition. The composition of the residual oil will change in the course of a COj EOR project. The optimum COj mobility control agent may thus change during the course of the project. 

Heller, J. P. "Reservoir Application of Mobility Control Foams in CO2 Floods, paper SPE/DOE 12644 presented at the SPE/DOE Fourth Joint Symposium on Enhanced Oil Recovery, Tulsa, Oklahoma, April 15-18, 1984. 

Foam exhibits higher apparent viscosity and lower mobility within permeable media than do its separate constituents.(1-3) This lower mobility can be attained by the presence of less than 0.1% surfactant in the aqueous fluid being injected.(4) The foaming properties of surfactants and other properties relevant to surfactant performance in enhanced oil recovery (EOR) processes are dependent upon surfactant chemical structure. Alcohol ethoxylates and alcohol ethoxylate derivatives were chosen to study techniques of relating surfactant performance parameters to chemical structure. These classes of surfactants have been evaluated as mobility control agents in laboratory studies (see references 5 and 6 and references therein). One member of this class of surfactants has been used in three field trials.(7-9) These particular surfactants have well defined structures and chemical structure variables can be assigned numerical values. Commercial products can be manufactured in relatively high purity. 

Both the use of one atmosphere foaming experiments and the technique of multiple correlation analysis have a common purpose minimizing the effort required to develop new surfactants for mobility control and other EOR applications. Proper use of these techniques with due consideration of their limitations can substantially reduce the number of experiments required to develop new surfactants or to understand the effect of surfactant chemical structure on physical properties and performance parameters. ... 

The surfactant systems used for mobility control in miscible flooding do not form a surfactant rich third phase, and lack its buffering action against surfactant adsorption. Furthermore, for obvious economic reasons, it is desirable to keep the surfactant concentration as low as possible, which increases the sensitivity of the dispersion stability to surfactant loss. Hence, surfactant adsorption is necessarily an even greater concern in the use of foams, emulsions, and dispersions for mobility control in miscible-flood EOR. The importance of surfactant adsorption in surfactant-based mobility control is widely recognized by researchers. A decision tree has even been published for selection of a mobility-control surfactant based on adsorption characteristics (12). 

Nearly all of the treatment processes in which fluids are injected into oil wells to increase or restore the levels of production make use of surface-active agents (surfactant) in some of their various applications, e.g., surface tension reduction, formation and stabilization of foam, anti-sludging, prevention of emulsification, and mobility control for gases or steam injection. The question that sometimes arises is whether the level of surfactant added to the injection fluids is sufficient to ensure that enough surfactant reaches the region of treatment. Some of the mechanisms which may reduce the surfactant concentration in the fluid are precipitation with other components of the fluid, thermally induced partition into the various coexisting phases in an oil-well treatment, and adsorption onto the reservoir walls or mineral... 

In recent years there has been considerable interest in the use of foams in chemical steam flood, CO2, and low tension processes. To date, principal applications have been as diverting agents where the foam has been used to block high permeability, low oil saturation zones and hence force drive fluids through lower permeability, higher oil saturation zones. The utility of foams in more general mobility control roles has not been extensively... 

Extensive mobility control applications of foams are limited by inadequate knowledge of foam displacement in porous media, plus uncertainties in the control of foam injection. Because of the importance of in situ foam texture (bubble size, bubble size distribution, bubble train length, etc.), conventional fractional flow approaches where the phase mobilities are represented in terms of phase saturations are not sufficient. As yet, an adequate description of foam displacement mechanisms and behavior is lacking, as well as a basis for understanding the various, often contradictory, macroscopic core flood observations. 

Dilgren, R. E., Deemer, A. R. and Owens, K. B., "Laboratory Development and Field Testing of Steam Foams for Mobility Control in Heavy Oil Reservoirs", SPE 10774, presented at the 1980 California Regional Meeting of SPE AIME, San Francisco, Calif., March 24-26, 1980. 

Computerized Tomography (CT) was used to study mobility control with CO2 foam during tertiary horizontal corefloods at reservoir pressures and temperatures. CO2 foam provided effective mobility control under first-contact miscible conditions. However, mobility control was not observed when the pressure was substantially reduced so -that the oil and CO2 were immiscible. If the beneficial effects of foam can be extended to developed-miscibility conditions, CO2 foam will be an outstanding EOR process. 

Two sets, i.e., four experiments, of core flow studies are compared. Sets No. 1 and No. 2 were tertiary miscible and immiscible CO2 floods without mobility control. The same core from each set, after plain CO2 injection, was restored to waterflood residual oil saturation and flooded with 0.05% AEGS 25-12 surfactant in brine. There was almost no difference between the oil saturation distributions in the cores between experiments, with the average Sorw values of 37 1 saturation percent in both sets of experiments. CO2 was injected continuously in all experiments at a nominal rate of 1 ft/day. No attempt was made to preform a foam, or to inject alternate slugs of surfactant solution and CO2. 

The important question is whether mobility control can be obtained in developed-miscibility CO2 flooding. Further research is required to define CO2 foam behavior under developed-miscibility conditions. 

Recently, use of a surfactant in the injected water such that a foam or emulsion is formed with carbon dioxide has been proposed (20.21) and research is proceeding on finding appropriate surfactants (22-24). The use of such a foam or emulsion offers the possibility of providing mobility control combined with amelioration of the density difference, a combination which should yield improved oil recovery. Laboratory studies at the University of Houston (25) with the same five-spot bead-pack model as used before show that this is so, for both the relatively water-wet and relatively oil-wet condition. We have now simulated, with a finite-difference reservoir process computer program, the laboratory model results under non-WA3, WAG, and foam displacement conditions for both secondary and tertiary recovery processes. This paper presents the results of that work. 

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