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Toward Reservoir-on-a-Chip: Rapid Performance Evaluation of Enhanced Oil Recovery Surfactants for Carbonate Reservoirs Using a Calcite-Coated Micromodel
Enhanced oil recovery (EOR) plays a significant role in improving oil production. Tertiary EOR, including surfactant flooding, can potentially mobilize residual oil after water flooding. Prior to the field deployment, the surfactant performance must be evaluated using site-specific crude oil at rese...
Autores principales: | , , , , , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Nature Publishing Group UK
2020
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6972785/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31964925 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-57485-x |
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author | Yun, Wonjin Chang, Sehoon Cogswell, Daniel A. Eichmann, Shannon L. Gizzatov, Ayrat Thomas, Gawain Al-Hazza, Naimah Abdel-Fattah, Amr Wang, Wei |
author_facet | Yun, Wonjin Chang, Sehoon Cogswell, Daniel A. Eichmann, Shannon L. Gizzatov, Ayrat Thomas, Gawain Al-Hazza, Naimah Abdel-Fattah, Amr Wang, Wei |
author_sort | Yun, Wonjin |
collection | PubMed |
description | Enhanced oil recovery (EOR) plays a significant role in improving oil production. Tertiary EOR, including surfactant flooding, can potentially mobilize residual oil after water flooding. Prior to the field deployment, the surfactant performance must be evaluated using site-specific crude oil at reservoir conditions. Core flood experiments are common practice to evaluate surfactants for oil displacement efficiency using core samples. Core flood experiments, however, are expensive and time-consuming and do not allow for pore scale observations of fluid-fluid interactions. This work introduces the framework to evaluate the performance of EOR surfactants via a Reservoir-on-a-Chip approach, which uses microfluidic devices to mimic the oil reservoir. A unique feature of this study is the use of chemically modified micromodels such that the pore surfaces are representative of carbonate reservoir rock. To represent calcium carbonate reservoir pores, the inner channels of glass microfluidic devices were coated with thin layers of calcium carbonate nanocrystals and the surface was modified to exhibit oil-wet conditions through a crude oil aging process. During surfactant screening, oil and water phases were imaged by fluorescence microscopy to reveal the micro to macro scale mechanisms controlling surfactant-assisted oil recovery. The role of the interfacial tension (IFT) and wettability in the microfluidic device was simulated using a phase-field model and compared to laboratory results. We demonstrated the effect of low IFT at the oil-water interface and wettability alteration on surfactant-enhanced oil displacement efficiency; thus providing a time-efficient and low-cost strategy for quantitative and qualitative assessment. In addition, this framework is an effective method for pre-screening EOR surfactants for use in carbonate reservoirs prior to further core and field scale testing. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-6972785 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2020 |
publisher | Nature Publishing Group UK |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-69727852020-01-27 Toward Reservoir-on-a-Chip: Rapid Performance Evaluation of Enhanced Oil Recovery Surfactants for Carbonate Reservoirs Using a Calcite-Coated Micromodel Yun, Wonjin Chang, Sehoon Cogswell, Daniel A. Eichmann, Shannon L. Gizzatov, Ayrat Thomas, Gawain Al-Hazza, Naimah Abdel-Fattah, Amr Wang, Wei Sci Rep Article Enhanced oil recovery (EOR) plays a significant role in improving oil production. Tertiary EOR, including surfactant flooding, can potentially mobilize residual oil after water flooding. Prior to the field deployment, the surfactant performance must be evaluated using site-specific crude oil at reservoir conditions. Core flood experiments are common practice to evaluate surfactants for oil displacement efficiency using core samples. Core flood experiments, however, are expensive and time-consuming and do not allow for pore scale observations of fluid-fluid interactions. This work introduces the framework to evaluate the performance of EOR surfactants via a Reservoir-on-a-Chip approach, which uses microfluidic devices to mimic the oil reservoir. A unique feature of this study is the use of chemically modified micromodels such that the pore surfaces are representative of carbonate reservoir rock. To represent calcium carbonate reservoir pores, the inner channels of glass microfluidic devices were coated with thin layers of calcium carbonate nanocrystals and the surface was modified to exhibit oil-wet conditions through a crude oil aging process. During surfactant screening, oil and water phases were imaged by fluorescence microscopy to reveal the micro to macro scale mechanisms controlling surfactant-assisted oil recovery. The role of the interfacial tension (IFT) and wettability in the microfluidic device was simulated using a phase-field model and compared to laboratory results. We demonstrated the effect of low IFT at the oil-water interface and wettability alteration on surfactant-enhanced oil displacement efficiency; thus providing a time-efficient and low-cost strategy for quantitative and qualitative assessment. In addition, this framework is an effective method for pre-screening EOR surfactants for use in carbonate reservoirs prior to further core and field scale testing. Nature Publishing Group UK 2020-01-21 /pmc/articles/PMC6972785/ /pubmed/31964925 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-57485-x Text en © The Author(s) 2020 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
spellingShingle | Article Yun, Wonjin Chang, Sehoon Cogswell, Daniel A. Eichmann, Shannon L. Gizzatov, Ayrat Thomas, Gawain Al-Hazza, Naimah Abdel-Fattah, Amr Wang, Wei Toward Reservoir-on-a-Chip: Rapid Performance Evaluation of Enhanced Oil Recovery Surfactants for Carbonate Reservoirs Using a Calcite-Coated Micromodel |
title | Toward Reservoir-on-a-Chip: Rapid Performance Evaluation of Enhanced Oil Recovery Surfactants for Carbonate Reservoirs Using a Calcite-Coated Micromodel |
title_full | Toward Reservoir-on-a-Chip: Rapid Performance Evaluation of Enhanced Oil Recovery Surfactants for Carbonate Reservoirs Using a Calcite-Coated Micromodel |
title_fullStr | Toward Reservoir-on-a-Chip: Rapid Performance Evaluation of Enhanced Oil Recovery Surfactants for Carbonate Reservoirs Using a Calcite-Coated Micromodel |
title_full_unstemmed | Toward Reservoir-on-a-Chip: Rapid Performance Evaluation of Enhanced Oil Recovery Surfactants for Carbonate Reservoirs Using a Calcite-Coated Micromodel |
title_short | Toward Reservoir-on-a-Chip: Rapid Performance Evaluation of Enhanced Oil Recovery Surfactants for Carbonate Reservoirs Using a Calcite-Coated Micromodel |
title_sort | toward reservoir-on-a-chip: rapid performance evaluation of enhanced oil recovery surfactants for carbonate reservoirs using a calcite-coated micromodel |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6972785/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31964925 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-57485-x |
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