Novel CO2/N2 Foam Concept and Optimization Scheme for Improving CO2-foam EOR Process

Nitrogen and Carbon dioxide are the most common gases utilized in enhanced oil recovery (EOR) techniques. Most of the gas injection process suffers from the gravity override and viscous fingering resulting in lower oil recovery. Foam is introduced in enhanced oil recovery (EOR) to mitigate these problems encountered during gas flooding. When it comes to the CO2-gas injection the CO2-becomes supercritical at a typical reservoir condition giving it difficulty to form CO2-foam at reservoir condition. The CO2-foam has a common problem to become weaker above its supercritical conditions of 1100 psi and 31°C. As a result, the advantages of using CO2 foam are diminished due to the weakness of CO2-foam at supercritical conditions and results in a lower recovery. However, CO2-foam can be generated by replacing a portion of CO2 with N2 gas. It lacks the understating of mixture properties and its effect on EOR. This study evaluates the performance of CO2/N2 foam at supercritical conditions for EOR. It aims to improve recovery under supercritical conditions by using N2/CO2 mixture foam and optimize the foam quality and CO2/N2 ratio. The results from the experiments showed that the CO2/N2 foam flooding recovered an additional oil of Original Initial Oil in Place (OIIP) indicating that foam flooding succeeded in producing more oil than pure CO2-foam injection processes. Also, the results of foam flooding at different foam quality and CO2/N2 ratio significantly affected the performance and recovery of the process. Hence it is necessary to optimize the CO2/N2 foam parameters flooding process which is affected by the parameters such as foam quality and CO2/N2 ratio. The study also shows an experimental approach for optimizing CO2/N2 foam parameters. The concept of adding N2 to CO2 is a novel way of generating CO2 foam at supercritical conditions. Although investigators are trying different ways to generate the strong and stable CO2- foam, adding N2 to CO2 can be considered to be the easiest way for foam generation as CO2 is always having some impurities in the form of other gases and N2 can be considered as one of such gas helps in generating the foam.

Fashioning the Increase of Oil and Gas Production through Advanced Cased Hole Formation Evaluation

Freshwater environment and high clay content are quite common in Indonesia. This introduces certain challenge in performing hydrocarbon identification and evaluation especially in already cased wells. In old producer wells, possible conditions such as fluid channeling behind casing and trapped hydrocarbon in annulus add more complexity in performing behind casing analysis to understand current reservoir condition. In order to increase the success in finding remaining hydrocarbon potential, PERTAMINA has deployed pulsed neutron logs (PNL) to accurately pinpoint the targeted interval for perforation. Since 2017, the PNL campaign has covered approximately 160 wells in PERTAMINA's development fields across Indonesia up until now. PNL service offers nuclear-based statistical measurement such as sigma, thermal neutron decay porosity (TPHI), and carbon-oxygen yield that allows simultaneous oil and gas saturation evaluation without any dependence on water salinity and other electrical properties of the formation and fluid. It also allows computation of elemental dry weight from elemental spectroscopy data which can be utilized to determine lithology to complement the standard open-hole logs dataset. The more advanced PNL tool raises the bar even further by offering new measurement of fast neutron capture cross section (FNXS) log which is useful to identify gas even in tight rock formation. The latest generation also features self-compensation algorithm resulting in more robust TPHI and sigma log under complex circumstances such as multi-casing/tubing. This paper showcases several prominent success stories of oil and gas findings identified from PNL interpretation in development wells. There are also several examples of elemental spectroscopy data utilization from PNL to prevent non-economical perforation by means of providing accurate lithology and porosity analysis as compared to previous result built from old and/or incomplete open-hole logs dataset. This PNL campaign has also given valuable insights of borehole and reservoir condition which might have been overlooked such as hydrocarbon in annulus, low pressure gas zone identification and batman's ear boundary effect. Low pressure gas zone may be qualitatively identified whenever TPHI from PNL is noticeably lower than neutron porosity measurement from the open-hole log. Batman's ear effect is usually observed when a body of sand is sandwiched between carbonaceous shales or coal layers resulting successive oil-water-oil saturation profile in one homogenous body of sand, shown as oil peaks at the bed boundaries similar with the appearance of batman's ear. As the sand gets thinner, these two oil peaks might merge into one solid body of high oil saturation which might not depict the true oil potential of the sand.

A GEOCHEMISTRY-ORIENTED WORKFLOW FOR WETTABILITY ASSESSMENT AT RESERVOIR CONDITION USING MOLECULAR DYNAMICS SIMULATIONS

Reliable quantification of wettability is critical in assessment of fluid distribution, capillary pressure, relative permeability, and flow properties of fluids in reservoirs. Wettability of reservoirs can be affected by chemical composition of rock-fluid system, salinity, and reservoir temperature. Experimental assessment of wettability under reservoir conditions, while gaining control on the aforementioned parameters, may be tedious and challenging. Several published researches have used experimental studies to focus on determining the impact of individual factors on wettability of rock. However, studies on the combined effects of these factors are limited, although critical, for better understanding of wettability of hydrocarbon reservoirs. In this paper we introduce a workflow for assessment of wettability of rocks at reservoir condition using molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. The outcomes include (i) quantifying the wettability of pure minerals, (ii) quantifying the impact of reservoir temperature on wettability of pure mineral. The inputs to the simulation include molecules of pure minerals (quartz, calcite, albite) packed in a cubical simulation box. The molecules are condensed to form a flat surface. Subsequently, water and oil (hexane) molecules are placed on the surface of the mineral. We then perform simulations with constant number of particles, temperature and volume (NVT) on the system till equilibrium is reached. At equilibrium, the contact angle formed by the water droplet is measured. Contact angle is simulated for temperature conditions in the range of 300 to 380 K. The results showed that the contact angle between water-mineral for quartz, calcite, and albite at room temperature (300 K) ranges from 30º to 45º, indicating that the surface of these minerals is hydrophilic, with different degrees of hydrophilicity. This information is essential for reliable fluid flow simulations, which are often overlooked in conventional approaches. We also found that the temperature has a measurable impact on the contact angles formed by water droplet. We found that increase in temperature from 300 to 380 K decreases the contact angles by approximately 30% on quartz surfaces, 20% on albite surfaces, and 24% on calcite surfaces. The results for the hexane-mineral system show that the hexane behaved similarly in the three minerals surface. A thin film of hexane is formed at the surface corresponding to a contact angle of 0º. The method introduced in this paper has application for reliable evaluation of wettability at any reservoir of interest by knowing the molecular structure of clay and non-clay minerals as well as fluid content. Moreover, the challenges of wettability determination under high temperature and pressure conditions can also be efficiently addressed by using molecular dynamics simulations.