Abstract
In chemical Enhanced Oil Recovery surfactants, solvents or other water based additives are used to mobilize micro bubble size trapped oil. Under favorable physical, chemical and spatial conditions the mobilized oil collects in an oil bank that will be displaced to the producer. Our understanding of when, and under which conditions an oil bank is formed, is very limited. This is relevant when core flow experiments are interpreted and upscaled from centimeter scale to field scale in various steps.
We built two experimental high precision setups for different volume scales to obtain reliable and accurate results. The first one is a Microfluidic setup, which visualizes and characterizes the dynamic of fluid flow at micrometer/pore scale. The second one is a high-end core flow setup which is used to study the dynamics of a mobilization process at meter/Darcy scale. These high-end development set-ups provide us with robust, accurate and repeatable experimental data for oil mobilization from micrometer/pore scale to one meter scale samples.
We experimentally demonstrated the process of oil bank build up at two different pore framework scales. These experimental results provided a high degree of data integrity. In addition, results give direct evidence for the mechanism of oil bank build up and upscaling procedure. We ensured the repeatability, reproducibility and integrity of the experimental data. We visualized and explored semi-quantitatively the entire process from mobilizing residual oil to dispersed flow to oil bank formation using a micro-fluidic device and core flow tests using cores of different lengths (7 – 100 cm)
