Core-scale sensitivity study of CO₂ foam injection strategies for mobility control, enhanced oil recovery, and CO₂ storage

Abstract

This paper presents experimental and numerical sensitivity studies to assist injection strategy design for an ongoing CO 2 foam field pilot. The aim is to increase the success of in-situ CO 2 foam generation and propagation into the reservoir for CO 2 mobility control, enhanced oil recovery (EOR) and CO 2 storage. Un-steady state in-situ CO 2 foam behavior, representative of the near wellbore region, and steady-state foam behavior was evaluated. Multi-cycle surfactant-alternating gas (SAG) provided the highest apparent viscosity foam of 120.2 cP, compared to co-injection (56.0 cP) and single-cycle SAG (18.2 cP) in 100% brine saturated porous media. CO 2 foam EOR corefloods at first-contact miscible (FCM) conditions showed that multi-cycle SAG generated the highest apparent foam viscosity in the presence of refined oil ( n -Decane). Multi-cycle SAG demonstrated high viscous displacement forces critical in field implementation where gravity effects and reservoir heterogeneities dominate. At multiple-contact miscible (MCM) conditions, no foam was generated with either injection strategy as a result of wettability alteration and foam destabilization in presence of crude oil. In both FCM and MCM corefloods, incremental oil recoveries were on average 30.6% OOIP regardless of injection strategy for CO 2 foam and base cases (i.e. no surfactant). CO 2 diffusion and miscibility dominated oil recovery at the core-scale resulting in high microscopic CO 2 displacement. CO 2 storage potential was 9.0% greater for multi-cycle SAGs compared to co-injections at MCM. A validated core-scale simulation model was used for a sensitivity analysis of grid resolution and foam quality. The model was robust in representing the observed foam behavior and will be extended to use in field scale simulations.

Topics & Concepts