Study on selective plugging characteristics and oil displacement mechanism of microsphere in porous media

Abstract

Microspheres are widely used as profile control and water plugging products at present. However, the current research on microspheres is mainly focused on oil displacement experiments. In order to solve this problem, based on the Bohai sea in the BZ of inhomogeneous reservoir conditions, this article has done the matching study on particle size and hole roar and the seepage research in porous medium by means of particle size analysis, pressure tests, single-phase block experiments, and the double tube parallel oil displacement experiments, revealing the characteristics of oil & water selective plugging and the mechanism of oil displacement in porous media. The results show that the average particle size of the microspheres increases from 4.857μm to 24.53μm, and the maximum expansion factor reaches 5.03 times after 72h of swelling in BZ25 oilfield water at 75 C. In the two-pipe parallel oil flooding experiment with the permeability of 1000mD and 3000mD respectively, the comprehensive recovery rate after the first water flooding is 28.06%, and the two-pipe average recovery rate is increased by 1.58% after the injection of 2000ppm microsphere with 0.3PV, and there is no significant increase in oil displacement efficiency. The comprehensive recovery rate reached 38.6% and increased by 8.99% after 4PV of subsequent water flooding, indicating that microsphere flooding effectively improved the water sweep efficiency of subsequent injection.