Feedback from Consortium

  1. Can foam be generated at reservoir flow velocities ~ 1ft/day.
  1. Scale up of the foam flow – Try some long core experiments, slim tube experiments.

George: Foam generation at 1 ft/day is an important area of research. There is a minimum pressure gradient required for foam generation. Some surfactants take several PVs for generation whereas some others take less. But in field scale we cannot do multiple PVs. Hence we need to characterize it better.

  1. UT used branched surfactants and here Rice uses linear surfactants for foam.

George: We use branched surfactants for low IFT EOR but may not be good foamers. Linear surfactants like AOS are very good foamers. However they can stabilize emulsion. Branched surfactants help in avoiding viscous emulsions.

  1. Degradation of non ionic surfactants is an important area and it is done systematically.  However the emphasis should be more on surfactants that have multiyear life. Also the concentration of surfactant should be considered not only for economics. If there is large quantity of surfactants in the produced fluids as emulsion and it cannot be sold until it is separated.

 

  1. Consortium should address more on heavy oil especially due to interests in Canada etc. 

George: We can combine A(alkaline) S (surfactant) and F (foam) for mobility control. Heavy oil has high acid number. Alkali can generate soap in situ and can be used in combination with a synthetic surfactant that is more hydrophilic. Foam can be used for mobility control. Microstudies have shown that even though oil may be very viscous, but as a result of the bubbles formed due to foam, it breaks the oil into emulsified drops and can be transported as oil in water emulsion. We have been able to observe it but don’t have a sponsored project on it yet.

  1. Research should be done at reservoir conditions of high temperature, high salinity (250,000 ppm), high pressure.

George:We have a sponsored project by ADNOC for high temperature, high salinity in carbonate cores.  We have some publications on this.  In the future we would be able to show more on that area.

  1. More NMR core analysis with hydrocarbons and characterizing cores. More studies using NMR are planned.
  2. CO2 foam flooding, low adsorption and understanding surfactant partitioning. How do we do more systematic studies on selecting such surfactants?  We plan to continue.
  3. Try molecular dynamics of supercritical CO2
  4. Some area of interest could be recovery from unconventional sources like shale.