Foam EOR performance in homogeneous porous media: simulation versus experiments

Abstract

Abstract In petroleum industry after primary production, associated gas released from separators or an inert gas from an external resource is injected into reservoir to push the oil toward production wells. The most important issue in injection process is that highly mobile fluids prefer to channel through porous media outgoing the oil phase. To overcome this problem, foam is injected into reservoir to increase sweep efficiency via reducing mobility ratio. Foam EOR performance in porous media depends on several factors including foam texture, media characteristics and injection scenarios. In this work, we used $$ {\text{MATLAB}} $$ MATLAB software to numerically simulate foam core flooding and also to fit $$ {\text{STARS}} $$ STARS parameters with data achieved from two previously performed foam injection experiments in Bentheimer core samples with lengths of 6.7″ and 15.1″. Then we used $$ {\text{CMG}} $$ CMG software to outstretch foam $$ {\text{EOR}} $$ EOR simulations to more realistic 2D and 3D geometries which were designed to study override issue in slant formations and also well patterns influence on foam $$ {\text{EOR}} $$ EOR performance. Results show that foam $$ {\text{EOR}} $$ EOR performance in slant pay zones with severe dip angles highly depends on foam strength, pay zone thickness and injection well location. Results also show that since foam always exhibits shear thinning characteristic, well patterns which use higher number of wider spread injection wells can aid to improve oil extraction efficiency during foam flooding.

Keywords

• Foam EOR
• Bentheimer sandstone
• CMG STARS
• Well pattern
• Slant formation