Low Adsorbing CO2 Soluble Surfactants for Commercially Viable Implementation of CO2 Foam EOR Technology

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amit Katiyar ◽  
Troy Knight ◽  
Adam Grzesiak ◽  
Pete Rozowski ◽  
Quoc Nguyen

Abstract Several gas Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) pilots enhanced with aqueous-foam based conformance solutions have been implemented in the last 30 years. While these pilots were technically successful, there were economic challenges limiting their commercial viability. Many of these pilots were implemented with water-soluble foaming surfactants that can get adversely affected by near wellbore gas-water gravity segregation and adsorption loss up to 90% of the injected surfactant. Novel, gas-soluble surfactants can be injected with the gas phase where these surfactants are carried with the gas to thief zones faster and deeper with relatively lower adsorption to the rock surface. However, the conventional foam modeling approach relied only on the surfactant concentration in brine to determine foam strength, which adversely predicted the performance of gas soluble surfactants. With proven laboratory evaluations and multiple successful field implementations, the advantages of low adsorbing and gas soluble surfactants cannot be ignored. In this paper, the advantages of surfactant partitioning to the gas phase are confirmed by correcting the conventional foam modeling approach while simulating 1D transport of CO2-foam displacing brine in porous media. An empirical foam model was developed from the lab scale core flooding work of CO2foam transport through porous media using a novel gas-soluble foaming surfactant. While investigating the performance of gas soluble surfactants, global surfactant concentration was used to determine foam strength as the surfactant can transport to the gas-water interface from both the phases. Lab experiments and simulations with an improved foam modeling approach confirmed that a higher gas phase partitioning surfactant generated robust foam and deeper foam propagation while injecting surfactant with CO2in a water saturated core. In addition, comparing three partition coefficient scenarios around 1 on mass basis, the higher gas phase partitioning surfactant showed the larger delay in gas breakthrough. Overall, the simulation results with our better modeling approach do support the advantages of the higher gas phase surfactant partitioning in deeper foam transport and conformance enhancement for the gas-EOR technology.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas Tilgner ◽  
Bastian Stieger ◽  
Dominik van Pinxteren ◽  
Gerald Spindler ◽  
Laurent Poulain ◽  
...  

<p>Organic acids are ubiquitous compounds in the troposphere and can affect human health, the climate, air quality, and the linked ecosystems. Depending on their solubility and volatility, they can partition in both gas phase and in the particle phase. In the particle phase, organic acids partly represent about 10% of the water-soluble organic matter. However, their partitioning between different phases is not fully understood yet. Therefore, an upgraded monitor for aerosols and gases in ambient air (MARGA) was applied for one year at the Central European TROPOS research site Melpitz to study the gas- and particle-phase partitioning of formic, acetic, propionic, butyric, glycolic, pyruvic, oxalic, malonic, succinic, malic, and methanesulfonic acid (MSA). Measured gas- and PM<sub>10</sub> particle-phase mean concentrations were 12−445 and 7−31 ng m<sup>-3</sup> for monocarboxylic acids (MCAs), between 0.6−8 and 4−31 ng m<sup>-3</sup> for dicarboxylic acids (DCAs), and 2 and 31 ng m<sup>-3</sup> for MSA, respectively. Assuming full dissolution in nonideal aerosol solutions, empirical noneffective Henry’s law constants (H<sub>emp</sub>) were calculated and compared with literature values (H<sub>lit</sub>). Calculated mean H<sub>emp</sub> were 4.5 × 10<sup>9</sup>−2.2 × 10<sup>10</sup> mol L<sup>−1</sup> atm<sup>−1</sup> for MCAs, 3.6 × 10<sup>10</sup>−7.5 × 10<sup>11</sup> mol L<sup>−1</sup> atm<sup>−1</sup> for DCAs, and 7.5 × 10<sup>7</sup> mol L<sup>−1</sup> atm<sup>−1</sup> for MSA and, thus, factors of 5.1 × 10<sup>3</sup>−9.1 × 10<sup>5</sup> and 2.5−20.3 higher than their corresponding H<sub>lit</sub> for MCAs and DCAs, respectively, and 9.0 × 10<sup>−5</sup> lower than H<sub>lit,MSA</sub>. Data analyses and thermodynamic calculations implicate that the formation of chemical association complexes and organic salts inhibits the partitioning of organic acids toward the gas phase and, thus, at least partly explains higher H<sub>emp</sub> values for both MCAs and summertime DCAs. Low H<sub>emp,MSA</sub> are also unexpected because of the high MSA solubility and are reported for the first time in this study. Overall, the results of the present study implicate that processes responsible for the observed stronger partitioning of carboxylic acids toward the particle phase need to be further investigated and accounted for in complex multiphase chemistry models as they affect the contribution of organic acids to secondary organic aerosol mass, their chemical processing, and lifetime.</p> <p> </p> <p> </p>


2011 ◽  
Vol 221 ◽  
pp. 15-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dong Xing Du ◽  
Ying Ge Li ◽  
Shi Jiao Sun

There are many attractive features for using CO2 foam injection in Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) processes. For understanding CO2 foam rheology in porous media, an experimental study is reported in this paper concerning CO2 film foam flow characteristics in a vertical straight tube. Foam is treated as non-Newtonian fluid and its pseudo-plastic behavior is investigated based on power law constitutive model. It is observed the CO2 film foam flow shows clear shear-thinning behavior, with flow consistency coefficient of K=0.15 and flow behavior index of n=0.48. The apparent viscosity of flowing CO2 film foam is under the shear rate of 50s-1 and under the shear rate of 1000s-1, which are 19 and 3 times higher than the single phase water. It is also found CO2 foam has lower apparent viscosity than the foam with air as the internal gas phase, which is in consistence with experimental observations for lower CO2 foam flow resistance in porous media.


Author(s):  
Mohsen Mirzaie Yegane ◽  
Julia Schmidt ◽  
Fatima Dugonjic-Bilic ◽  
Benjamin Gerlach ◽  
Pouyan E. Boukany ◽  
...  

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandru Tatomir ◽  
Huhao Gao ◽  
Hiwa Abdullah ◽  
Martin Sauter

<p>Fluid-fluid interfacial area (IFA) in a two-phase flow in porous media is an important parameter for many geoscientific applications involving mass- and energy-transfer processes between the fluid-phases. Schaffer et al. (2013) introduced a new category of reactive tracers termed kinetically interface sensitive (KIS) tracers, able to quantify the size of the fluid-fluid IFA. In our previous experiments (Tatomir et al., 2018) we have demonstrated the application of the KIS tracers in a highly-controlled column experiment filled with a well-characterized porous medium consisting of well-sorted, spherical glass beads.</p><p>In this work we investigate several types of glass-bead materials and natural sands to quantitatively characterize the influence of the porous-medium grain-, pore-size and texture on the mobile interfacial area between an organic liquid and water. The fluid-fluid interfacial area is determined by interpretation of the breakthrough curves (BTCs) of the reaction product of the KIS tracer. When the tracer which is dissolved in the non-wetting phase meets the water, an irreversible hydrolysis process begins leading to the formation of two water-soluble products. For the experiments we use a peristaltic pump and a high precision injection pump to control the injection rate of the organic liquid and tracer.</p><p>A Darcy-scale numerical model is used to simulate the immiscible displacement process coupled with the reactive tracer transport across the fluid-fluid interface. The results show that the current reactive transport model is not always capable to reproduce the breakthrough curves of tracer experiments and that a new theoretical framework may be required.</p><p>Investigations of the role of solid surface area of the grains show that the grain surface roughness has an important influence on the IFA. . Furthermore, a linear relationship between the mobile capillary associated IFA and the inverse mean grain diameter can be established. The results are compared with the data collected from literature measured with high resolution microtomography and partitioning tracer methods. The capillary associated IFA values are consistently smaller because KIS tracers measure the mobile part of the interface. Through this study the applicability range of the KIS tracers is considerably expanded and the confidence in the robustness of the method is improved.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Schaffer M, Maier F, Licha T, Sauter M (2013) A new generation of tracers for the characterization of interfacial areas during supercritical carbon dioxide injections into deep saline aquifers: Kinetic interface-sensitive tracers (KIS tracer). International Journal of Greenhouse Gas Control 14:200–208. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijggc.2013.01.020</p><p>Tatomir A, Vriendt KD, Zhou D, et al (2018) Kinetic Interface Sensitive Tracers: Experimental Validation in a Two-Phase Flow Column Experiment. A Proof of Concept. Water Resources Research 54:10,223-10,241. https://doi.org/10.1029/2018WR022621</p>


2013 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 1023-1037 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Mouchel-Vallon ◽  
P. Bräuer ◽  
M. Camredon ◽  
R. Valorso ◽  
S. Madronich ◽  
...  

Abstract. The gas phase oxidation of organic species is a multigenerational process involving a large number of secondary compounds. Most secondary organic species are water-soluble multifunctional oxygenated molecules. The fully explicit chemical mechanism GECKO-A (Generator of Explicit Chemistry and Kinetics of Organics in the Atmosphere) is used to describe the oxidation of organics in the gas phase and their mass transfer to the aqueous phase. The oxidation of three hydrocarbons of atmospheric interest (isoprene, octane and α-pinene) is investigated for various NOx conditions. The simulated oxidative trajectories are examined in a new two dimensional space defined by the mean oxidation state and the solubility. The amount of dissolved organic matter was found to be very low (yield less than 2% on carbon atom basis) under a water content typical of deliquescent aerosols. For cloud water content, 50% (isoprene oxidation) to 70% (octane oxidation) of the carbon atoms are found in the aqueous phase after the removal of the parent hydrocarbons for low NOx conditions. For high NOx conditions, this ratio is only 5% in the isoprene oxidation case, but remains large for α-pinene and octane oxidation cases (40% and 60%, respectively). Although the model does not yet include chemical reactions in the aqueous phase, much of this dissolved organic matter should be processed in cloud drops and modify both oxidation rates and the speciation of organic species.


2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (11) ◽  
pp. 7357-7371 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mi Tian ◽  
Huanbo Wang ◽  
Yang Chen ◽  
Fumo Yang ◽  
Xiaohua Zhang ◽  
...  

Abstract. Extremely severe haze weather events occurred in many cities in China, especially in the east part of the country, in January 2013. Comprehensive measurements including hourly concentrations of PM2.5 and its major chemical components (water-soluble inorganic ions, organic carbon (OC), and elemental carbon (EC)) and related gas-phase precursors were conducted via an online monitoring system in Suzhou, a medium-sized city in Jiangsu province, just east of Shanghai. PM2.5 (particulate matter with an aerodynamic diameter of 2.5 µm or less) frequently exceeded 150 µg m−3 on hazy days, with the maximum reaching 324 µg m−3 on 14 January 2013. Unfavorable weather conditions (high relative humidity (RH), and low rainfall, wind speed, and atmospheric pressure) were conducive to haze formation. High concentrations of secondary aerosol species (including SO42−, NO3−, NH4+, and SOC) and gaseous precursors were observed during the first two haze events, while elevated primary carbonaceous species emissions were found during the third haze period, pointing to different haze formation mechanisms. Organic matter (OM), (NH4)2SO4, and NH4NO3 were found to be the major contributors to visibility impairment. High concentrations of sulfate and nitrate might be explained by homogeneous gas-phase reactions under low RH conditions and by heterogeneous processes under relatively high RH conditions. Analysis of air mass trajectory clustering and potential source contribution function showed that aerosol pollution in the studied areas was mainly caused by local activities and surrounding sources transported from nearby cities.


1989 ◽  
Vol 4 (02) ◽  
pp. 221-227 ◽  
Author(s):  
John K. Williams ◽  
Richard A. Dawe

2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (22) ◽  
pp. 14409-14420 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neha Sareen ◽  
Annmarie G. Carlton ◽  
Jason D. Surratt ◽  
Avram Gold ◽  
Ben Lee ◽  
...  

Abstract. Aqueous multiphase chemistry in the atmosphere can lead to rapid transformation of organic compounds, forming highly oxidized, low-volatility organic aerosol and, in some cases, light-absorbing (brown) carbon. Because liquid water is globally abundant, this chemistry could substantially impact climate, air quality, and health. Gas-phase precursors released from biogenic and anthropogenic sources are oxidized and fragmented, forming water-soluble gases that can undergo reactions in the aqueous phase (in clouds, fogs, and wet aerosols), leading to the formation of secondary organic aerosol (SOAAQ). Recent studies have highlighted the role of certain precursors like glyoxal, methylglyoxal, glycolaldehyde, acetic acid, acetone, and epoxides in the formation of SOAAQ. The goal of this work is to identify additional precursors and products that may be atmospherically important. In this study, ambient mixtures of water-soluble gases were scrubbed from the atmosphere into water at Brent, Alabama, during the 2013 Southern Oxidant and Aerosol Study (SOAS). Hydroxyl (OH⚫) radical oxidation experiments were conducted with the aqueous mixtures collected from SOAS to better understand the formation of SOA through gas-phase followed by aqueous-phase chemistry. Total aqueous-phase organic carbon concentrations for these mixtures ranged from 92 to 179 µM-C, relevant for cloud and fog waters. Aqueous OH-reactive compounds were primarily observed as odd ions in the positive ion mode by electrospray ionization mass spectrometry (ESI-MS). Ultra high-resolution Fourier-transform ion cyclotron resonance mass spectrometry (FT-ICR-MS) spectra and tandem MS (MS–MS) fragmentation of these ions were consistent with the presence of carbonyls and tetrols. Products were observed in the negative ion mode and included pyruvate and oxalate, which were confirmed by ion chromatography. Pyruvate and oxalate have been found in the particle phase in many locations (as salts and complexes). Thus, formation of pyruvate/oxalate suggests the potential for aqueous processing of these ambient mixtures to form SOAAQ.


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