We report on an extensive investigation of solute mixing and spreading in reservoir rocks, including Bentheimer Sandstone (BS), Ketton Limestone (KL), Edward Brown (EB) carbonate and Indiana Limestone (IL), as well as unconsolidated bead pack (BP) as control material. We observe that the selected rock samples possess distinct strength of subcore-scale heterogeneity and present characteristic...
A domain decomposition algorithm is introduced to couple non isothermal compositional gas liquid Darcy and free gas flow and transport. At each time step, our algorithm solves iteratively the nonlinear system coupling the nonisothermal compositional Darcy flow in the porous medium, the RANS gas flow in the free-flow domain, and the transport of the species and of energy in the free-flow...
Direct measurement of shale gas adsorption isotherms at high pressures and high temperatures (HPHT) is intricate and requires expensive apparatuses. Most of the documented studies only report shale gas adsorption data at pressures below 12 MPa, which is much smaller than the reservoir pressure, e.g., up to 36 MPa in Eagle Ford shale. Recent studies also suggest that the excess adsorption...
Abstract
Random fractures widely exist in water/oil reservoirs, soils etc. Study of the permeability of the fractured networks has been one of focuses in the area of mass transfer in the past decades. Generally, the fractures in scale reservoirs distribute randomly and have statistical self-similarity and fractal characteristic. In this paper, the permeability model for gas flow in the...
In hydraulic fracturing of unconventional reservoirs, the stimulation fluid is injected at a different temperature than initial reservoir temperature. The dynamic temperature profile of stimulation fluid during the treatment can provide critical information for fracturing design. In this work, an analytical solution to model the stimulation fluid temperature profile during hydraulic fracturing...
Structural trapping is the ultimate barrier for reducing the risk of leaks at CO2 storage sites. Small pores in high specific surface clay-rich caprocks give rise to high capillary entry pressures and high viscous drag that hinder the migration of buoyant carbon dioxide CO2.
In this work we show measurements of the CO2 breakthrough pressure and ensuing CO2 permeability through sediment plugs...
Unconventional shale reservoirs with high organic content and swelling clays may have a high affinity for uptake of carbon dioxide (CO2). The pore space and mineral surfaces that sorb/contain petroleum are also potential sorption sites for CO2 and could become available for CO2 uptake once the reservoir is produced and depressurized. Understanding how shales interact with CO2 is important for...
Dimensional analysis applied to bacterial chemotaxis towards NAPL contaminants
Xiaopu Wang 1§, Beibei Gao 2§, Shuaiwei Gu 3, Wei Zhong 1, Kenneth S. Kihaule 1, Roseanne M. Ford 2*
1. National Engineering Laboratory for Subsea Equipment Testing and Detection Technology, China University of Petroleum (East China), Qingdao 266555, China
2. Department of Chemical Engineering, University of...
Shale gas reservoirs are typically characterized by nanometer pore throats and very low permeability matrix requiring hydraulic fracturing stimulation of horizontal wells. Water is the main fluid used in hydraulic fracturing and a variety of chemicals are mixed with the water each for a different pur¬pose. Given the very low permeability of shales, very high pressure gradients are experienced...
Poultice technology is currently mainly used for the desalination of masonry structures in the field of architectural heritage conservation [1]. Wet poultices are coated on the porous material to be treated, and kept in place before being removed when dry. The efficiency of the process basically depends on the drying behavior of the system poultice/substrate, but so far little is known...
After production, all wells need to be permanently plugged and abandoned (P&A'ed). Long-term well integrity will then rely on the integrity of cement, which is the material typically used for permanent well plugging and for filling the annular spaces between casing/rock. The cement is pumped into the well as a slurry, and hardens to form mechanical and hydraulic seals. Cement has proven to be...
As a kind of clean and potential energy resource, large quantities of gas hydrates have been proved to exist widely in the permafrost and in deep marine environments with high pressure and low temperature conditions favorable for their formation. Recently, how to develop and exploit the natural gas hydrate reservoir efficiently is one of the critical issues in the energy resource R&D in 21st...
Microbially Induced Calcite Precipitation (MICP), or bio-cementation, has shown significant promise as an environmentally-conscious alternative to traditional geotechnical ground improvement technologies, which oftentimes rely on hazardous grouting chemicals, high mechanical energy, and energy-intensive materials to improve the engineering properties of soils (DeJong et al. 2013). In the urea...
Foam fluid is a gas-liquid dispersion system whose range of application covers various fields due to its excellent properties, especially in oil and gas field development including enhanced oil recovery, matrix acidizing, gas breakthrough control, profile control, plugging removal, etc. However, factors such as dependence on natural N2 sources, breakthrough of N2 to production wells,...
Natural Gas Hydrate (NGH) widely distributed in marine sediments and permafrost areas has attracted global attentions as potential energy resources. Permeability is a critical parameter that influences the gas production potential from hydrate reservoirs. The hydrate saturation affects the characteristics of the porous media, which is also the key factor determining the permeability. In this...
Biologically mediated processes are being developed as an alternative approach to traditional ground improvement techniques. Denitrification has been investigated as a potential ground improvement process towards liquefaction hazard mitigation. During denitrification, microorganisms reduce nitrate to dinitrogen gas and facilitate calcium carbonate precipitation as a by-product under adequate...
In a geological carbon storage (GCS) project, it is critical to predict the extent of injected CO2. However, it is not practical to quantify the uncertainty in the CO2 plume extent by conducting full physics flow simulations for hundreds of geological models representing high geological uncertainty. In this study, a computationally efficient surrogate model is introduced to quickly approximate...
In areas contaminated by the petroleum industry, persistent compounds such as polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) are often accumulated in the porous matrixes of sediments and soils (S&S), implicating risks to ecosystems and human health since these contaminants are released over time to interstitial and surrounding water. Pore size distributions (PSD) and PAH binding strengths to sorption sites...
Modeling DNAPL source zone plume evolution using traditional flow and transport models is a computationally intensive process that requires specification of a large number of material properties and hydrologic/chemical parameters. Given its computational burden, Monte Carlo simulation using such models is particularly ill-suited for uncertainty assessment and/or subsurface sampling...
Hydraulic fracturing fluids (HFF’s) have been used for several decades to control mechanical, hydraulic, and geochemical behavior in unconventional reservoirs during stimulation. The interactions that occur in these environments during stimulation (hydrofracturing) are designed to prevent scaling, improve production, and prevent damage to formations. However, there is still uncertainty with...
A multi-relaxation-time lattice Boltzmann (LB) model for nanoscale liquid flow is developed to investigate the liquid flow characteristics in nanoporous media. The slip length and effective viscosity obtained from molecular dynamics (MD) simulations are adopted to account for the nanoscale effect. First, the LB model for water flow in nanopores is built and water flow characteristics in...
Hot solvent injection is an in-situ technology which uses heated solvent for efficient and sustainable viscous oil (VO) recovery (cf. 93 kg per barrel less GHG emission than SAGD technology). The process reduces the oil viscosity via mass and heat transfer so that the combined effect of heating and solvent dilution yields a better result than in steam (SAGD) or cold solvent injection (VAPEX)...
Heat conduction in granular porous media is a phenomenon that is relevant to a broad spectrum of problems in science and engineering disciplines including physical, earth, and biological sciences, to name a few. Effective thermal conductivity in granular porous media is a function of morphological features of the medium such as grain shape, grain size, and geometrical structure. Thermal...
The inverse problem of parameter identification consists in the optimal determination of model parameters using water-level observations. We are concerned with the estimation of the transmissivity and storativity in a confined aquifer in transient conditions. One of the approach used to solve this problem, is called the Differential System (DS) method. It is based on the solution of a Cauchy...
Denitrification is one of the key microbial reactions for sandy soils to induce desaturation and calcium carbonate precipitation. As the replacement of urea hydrolysis for microbially induced carbonate precipitation (MICP), the effect by denitrification has been evaluated. Calcium carbonate precipitation and biomass production occur in soil through the reaction process and some of these...
Flows in packed beds are encountered in many engineering applications, such as solar thermal energy storages, chemical catalytic reactors, petroleum and civil engineering, magnetic refrigerators, biological tissues, and pebble-bed nuclear reactors.
Critical challenge of designing packed beds involves understanding the total pressure loss, complex flow fields, heat and mass transfer phenomena...
Proppants are small, granular additives used in hydraulic fracturing to keep induced fractures open and permeable after the reservoir pressure is lowered; typically sand is used. These materials are designed to resist the closure force across a fracture face and allow fluid to migrate out of the system. While the simple mechanical support of the proppant keeping a fracture open is well...
Natural gas hydrate is an ice like crystalline compound with a cage structure under high pressure and low temperature. The hydrate will decompose when the pressure is lower than the hydrate equilibrium pressure, so the pressure propagation rule is different from the porous medium without hydrate. Based on the theoretical analysis method of fluid mechanics in porous medium and considering the...
Shale rocks play an essential role in petroleum exploration and production because they can occur either as caprocks for subsurface storage in conventional reservoirs or as unconventional reservoir rocks for hydrocarbon extraction via hydraulic fracturing. The ability to produce gas from rocks previously only considered caprocks is an unprecedented and innovative feat, but does not come...
In order for a deep-water wellbore to uphold its integrity under high pressure - high temperature conditions, the wellbore must possess complete zonal isolation while surrounded in an extreme environment. Highly variable temperature and pressure ranges, shallow flow zones, as well as potentially corrosive fluids and gasses all present unique challenges to the job of the cement which maintains...
Objectives/Scope:
Foam can improve sweep efficiency in gas-injection enhanced oil recovery. Surfactant-alternating-gas (SAG) is a favored method of foam injection due to injectivity and operational considerations. Laboratory data indicate that foam can be non-Newtonian in the high-quality regime, and therefore during gas injection in a SAG process. We investigate the implications of this...
The effective visco-elastic properties of reservoir rocks are strongly dependent on characteristics of the pore geometry and of the inherent viscous pore fluids, saturation degree and excitation frequency. Constraining these dependencies is important for the interpretation of seismic data from geothermal or oil and gas reservoirs. Thus, experimental studies are needed that focus on effective...
The Center for Biofilm Engineering (CBE) at Montana State University has a long, successful history of investigating biofilm and mineral precipitation processes in subsurface environments. This poster summarizes many of the experimental approaches the CBE has taken to develop field-suitable technologies. There are numerous applications for engineered biomineralization. The CBE has largely...
Pore structure of large scale porous limestone reservoir with strong heterogeneity is very complex，so it is difficult to evaluate its pore structure of Mishrif Formation of W oilfield in Iraq. Based on thin section observation，porosity and permeability test and mercury injection capillary pressure test，fractal theory was applied to quantitative pore structure evaluation，and the pore fractal...
We present a theoretical investigation on the processes underpinning the reduced longitudinal spreading documented in stable variable density flows, as opposed to constant density settings, within heterogeneous porous media. We do so by decomposing velocity and pressure in terms of stationary and dynamic components. The former corresponds to the solution of the constant density flow problem,...
Injection of supercritical carbon dioxide (CO2) into geological formations is used for both atmospheric greenhouse gas reduction (climate change mitigation) and enhanced oil recovery. In an effort to fully understand CO2 trapping efficiency, the capillary trapping behaviors that immobilize subsurface fluids were analyzed at the pore-scale using pairs of proxy fluids representing the range of...
To quantify in-situ CO2 residual trapping for CO2 geological storage, dedicated push-pull experiments have been carried out at the Heletz, Israel pilot CO2 injection site. The site is well characterized and instrumented for CO2 injection and sophisticated sampling and monitoring (Niemi et al., 2016) and residual trapping experiments have been carried out during 2016-2017. The objective of the...
To date, soil bio-cementation via Microbially Induced Carbonate Precipitation (MICP) has been extensively studied as a promising alternative technique for ground improvement to address the growing environmental concerns of traditional chemical cementing agents. This paper presents a new one-phase injection method of biocementation using an acidified all-in-one biocementation solution (i.e., a...
We present a numerical analysis of fluid phase distributions and relative permeabilities obtained from direct pore-scale simulations of two-phase flow through a real pore space with diverse conditions of wettability. Exploring the effects of wettability on the fluid behaviors within porous media is of fundamental relevance for a variety of engineering as well as environmental applications,...
Fractal model of gas diffusion coefficient is derived for porous nanofibers, which are assumed to be composed of a bundle of tortuous capillaries whose pore size distribution and roughness of wall surfaces of capillaries follow the fractal scaling laws. The analytical expression for gas relative diffusion coefficient is a function of the relative roughness, fiber radius and microstructural...
3d printing in the oil and gas industry is in its infancy. The ability to use 3d printing to not only produce tools and equipment, that could not be manufactured in traditional manners, is only the beginning. There are several possible applications for 3d printing to facilitate this project:
• Controlled deposition of unique and varied barrier materials
• Equipment development for...
Most of the water-flooding fields in the eastern part of our country have now entered the stage of high-water-cut mining, their actual recovery rates are generally low. Because of this, the research on the remaining oil distribution in the reservoir is urgent. In order to reflect the influence of the pore structure parameters of the core on remaining oil from the microscopic scale, this...
Foam injection into the subsurface is generally performed to improve gas mobility control during enhanced-oil recovery (EOR) and contaminated site remediation (Lake et al., 1989; Hirasaki et al., 2000; Mulligan et al., 2006). Several experiments have been conducted to study the foam generation mechanism at both the pore and continuum scales (Kovscek et al., 1994; Kam et al., 2003; Gauteplass...
Geomaterial pore networks are highly tortuous with intricate geometries and varying surface roughness. It is reported in literature that both pore geometry and surface roughness influence flow through porous media (Ketcham and Carlson, 2001; Noiriel et al., 2016; Lv et al., 2017). Surface roughness is quantified by the deviations in the direction of flow perpendicular to the real surface....
Although foams are known for effectively reducing gas mobility and enhancing oil recovery in many field applications, it is still not clear how far the injected fine-textured foams will propagate into the reservoirs. Lacking such a knowledge makes the design of foam field treatments difficult and often unreliable. The purpose of this study is to investigate CO2 foam propagation distance as a...
Flow and transport in porous media is encountered in many industrial and hydrogeological applications, such as hydrogen fuel cells, inkjet printing, hydrocarbon exploration, and subsurface remediation. The relevant study domain can cross multiple scales from a few nanometers to hundreds of kilometers. Therefore, in porous media research, the upscaling and multiscale techniques have been widely...
Soil is a complex environment in which the presence of several phases creates numerous interfaces (solid-liquid, liquid-gas and solid-gas). Understanding the local hydrodynamics in soil pores and the biogeochemical processes such as nutrient cycling has been of growing importance in the field of bioremediation and ecology. Besides the coexistence of two immiscible phases (air and water) in the...
Zhang Yongfeng, Jiang Yongxu, Lu Guoqiang
Exploration and Development Research Institute of Daqing Oilfield Company Ltd.,Daqing,China
ABSTRACT: This papers identity the coal structure in Daqing exploration area, and to discuss types of pore in different basins. Coal is a complicated porous medium. Adsorbability and permeability of its pore structure for coalbed methane (CBM) has drawn...
Understanding the influence of CO2 injection on rock stress is one of the key elements to analyze CO2 Enhanced gas recovery and long term CO2-storage in tight sand gas reservoirs. Producing natural gas from reservoir and injecting CO2 to the tight reservoir causes a change in pore pressure, which in turn, changes the three dimensional effective stress state. The stress path followed by the...
Salt are a major cause of destruction by crystallization of porous media. Salt will in general enter a porous medium by advection with moisture or diffusion within the moisture. A special situation which occurs often in marine environments in which case there is a permanent supply of sea water at one side of a porous material such as a concrete structure. At the other side, the structure is...
Microbial dynamics in porous media are drivers for a number of applications in subsurface pollutant remediation. Biofilms are communities of microorganisms that are attached to interfaces (pores-grains), and embedded within a matrix of extracellular polymeric substances (EPS) that they have produced. Growing biofilms have a very small effect on porosity, but a very significant effect on the...
To understand how does the injected CO2 migration could help increase the available storage capacity in geologic formations, this paper reports a series of experiments of core flooding. To examine the effects of CO2migration pathways in geologic formations, our team have developed a core flooding test of displacing water in porous media with CO2. The samples were obtained from the Ordos Basin,...
Dual-porosity media widely exist in natural reservoirs and have been received much attention in heat and mass transfer. Due to multiplicative cascade effects, the microstructure might be disordered and complicated, with fractures/pores scale-invariantly distributed. In this study, we briefly introduce the concept of General Fractal Topography proposed recently which not only reduces modeling...
The pore blocking caused by solid particles migration is the major reason to formation damage. In order to further describe the solid particles blocking process, the realistic pore network model is established based on the results of micro-CT scanning. At the same time, the granularity distribution model is generated according to the solid phase particles size distribution. Then the “blocking...
Fluid flow though geologic fractured/porous media tends to become non-Dacian as a result of the competition between viscous and inertial forces and the effect of pore geometry variation. The Forchheimer equation has been widely shown to apply in these situations, in which the coefficient of viscous permeability (kv) is largely predictable, but this is not so for the coefficient of inertial...
We present here our efforts to characterize wellbore interfaces via chemical and mechanical characterization methods. These methods including mechanical “push-out” tests to measure interfacial bond strengths between cement, host media, and polymeric seal repair materials, 3D geochemical modelling of the wellbore environment during subsurface operations, and “mock-wellbore” experimental test...
In the context of geological carbon sequestration (GCS), carbon dioxide (CO2) is often injected into deep formations saturated with a brine that may contain dissolved light hydrocarbons such as methane (CH4). In this multicomponent multiphase displacement process, CO2 competes with CH4 in terms of dissolution, and CH4 tends to exsolve from the aqueous into a gaseous phase. Because CH4 has a...
• Akerke Mukhamediarova (Institut Elie Cartan, Université de Lorraine)
• Mikhail Panfilov (Institut Elie Cartan – Université de Lorraine ; and
Institut Jean le Rond d’Alembert, Sorbonne Universités)
Oil displacement by water which contains microorganisms able to produce bio-surfactants is one of the most promising methods of oil recovery. The bio-surfactant significantly reduces...
The progression of reactions in systems where mixing occurs has been the subject of investigation for decades; however, there is still much that is unknown about such systems. One area of particular interest to us is the influence of the initial configuration of a system as it evolves in time. Many (if not most) investigations of mixing are formulated at the long time limit, which requires...
The phenomena of tight gas reservoirs with super-normally saturated water, which exhibit the unique combination of very high initial water saturation combined with low to very low permeability (permeability of less than 0.1 mD) exist extensively in a number of regional sedimentary basins. Traditionally, multiphase flow of natural gas and connate water is evaluated in laboratory by conducting...
Carbon dioxide huff-n-puff process can be used as an effective geological storage approach for oil reservoirs. In this study, the experiment method of carbon dioxide huff and puff was established by high-pressure physical simulation system for large scale outcrops. The corresponding development effectiveness and influence factors of the huff-n-puff process were analyzed. Such as time of...
In EOR research, the use of natural reservoir core is faced with four main problems: 1. The repeatability of the petrophysical properties in natural reservoir core is poor, making it unsuitable for contrast and repeat experiments to examine the influence of individual petrophysical factor under specified physical conditions. 2. The physical properties of the natural reservoir core are...
Physics of two-phase flows in heterogeneous natural rocks plays an important role in many applications, such as carbon sequestration in deep saline reservoirs and recovery of oil from hydrocarbon reservoirs. Although pore-scale models are used to compute macroscopic average properties required in field-scale simulators, most work is limited to small sample size. There is a need for pore-scale...
Surfactants can drastically reduce the water/oil interfacial tension (IFT) to mobilize residual oil. However, surfactant flooding is viscously unstable inherently because of its large mobility ratio. Alkaline/surfactant/polymer (ASP) flooding has been serving as a conventional solution, where polymer plays a vital role in increasing viscosity for a more stable oil bank. Recently, a...
Density-driven convection can accelerate the rate of CO2 solubility trapping during geological CO2 storage in deep saline aquifers. We present a bench-scale experimental method based on refractive light transmission (RLT) in an analogue system that enables comprehensive study of solutally induced density-driven convection in saturated porous media. In an analogue system, we investigate...
Subsurface flow processes involving non-Newtonian fluids play a major role in many engineering applications, from in-situ remediation to enhanced oil recovery. The fluids of interest in such applications (f.e., polymers in remediation) often present shear-thinning properties, i.e., their viscosity decreases as a function of the local shear rate. We investigate how fracture wall roughness...
