Engineering Commons^™

Evaluation Of Millimeter-Sized Preformed Particle Gel For Conformance Control Treatments Using Simple Models, Ali Abdulmohsen Al Brahim

Masters Theses

Millimeter-sized preformed particle gels (PPGs) have been successfully used to tackle the high-permeable zones, fractures and channels in mature oilfields for conformance control improvement. PPGs can significantly reduce the permeability of abnormal fractures and divert injected water to the low permeable zones where hydrocarbon was not swept by previous water flooding. Due to the irregularity of PPGs in shapes after swollen, their strength cannot be easily measured using the conventional methods. Therefore, the open hole screen plate models with various hole diameters and density were designed to establish a simple technique that can be used to measure the strength of …

Synthesis Of Different Sizes & Functions Nanoparticles, Jiaming Geng

Masters Theses

"Nanogels, whose size range from 1 to 100nm, have been interested in many research areas: cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, catalysts, photochemistry, and in optical switches or sensors. In Petroleum Engineering area, nanogels can be used as conformance control agent and emulsion stabilizer. And after grafting functional groups or hybrid, nanogels can be used as tracer for the visual modeling.

Though nanoparticles have been studied for more than 20 years, few of them are about nanogels. In the thesis, stirring rate, surfactant type and concentration were found have a large impact on the synthesis of nanogels. And cationic nanogels have salt and acid …

Steam Flooding Screening And Eor Prediction By Using Clustering Algorithm And Data Visualization, Na Zhang

Masters Theses

"Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) techniques are vitally important in the oil industry because these techniques could not only extend the life of wells, but also produce 10% to 30% additional oil from the reservoir. However, selecting the most suitable EOR techniques for unknown reservoirs is not easy for decision making. Based on literature, EOR screening criteria could help to find the best candidates for unknown projects, which is classified into two categories: conventional EOR screening and advanced EOR screening. In this research, an artificial intelligent (AI) method, hierarchical clustering algorithm, is adapted to analyze both steam flooding projects and worldwide …

Experimental Study Of Crude Oil Emulsion Stability By Surfactants And Nanoparticles, Zainab Alabdulmohsen

Masters Theses

"Surfactants and nanoparticles are materials being widely used for enhanced oil recovery (EOR). Surfactants are mainly used to reduce the interfacial tension between oil and water which could form a stable film of emulsion between these two immiscible fluids. Also, nanotechnology is a potential candidate to offer another solution to improve oil recovery. Nanoparticles can form a solid layer at the droplet's interface and stand as resistant stabilizer under harsh reservoir conditions.

This research investigates whether the combination of surfactants and nanoparticles can provide a more stable emulsion than surfactants only. Two parts of experimental study have been done in …

Co₂ Miscible Flooding Application And Screening Criteria, Mingfei Yin

Masters Theses

"Field experience has shown that CO₂ miscible flooding is an effective method to improve oil recovery, but only with proper reservoir candidate selection and optimal project design. This paper discusses both CO₂ miscible and immiscible flooding mechanisms and offers some guidelines for flooding operations. New developments in MMP determination are also introduced.

This research is based on a summary of field data from 134 CO₂ projects in the U.S. Several numerical methods have been applied for data cleaning. After cleaning, data from 128 projects have been analyzed and correlated. Carbonate reservoirs and sandstone reservoirs are the two …

Effect Of Polymer On Disproportionate Permeability Reduction To Gas And Water For Fractured Shales, Lingbo Liu

Masters Theses

"Large volumes of fracturing fluid are required in shale slickwater fracs, and a considerable amount of polymer friction reducer would remain in microfractures if the polymer has not been broken before gas production. It is of major interest to evaluate the effect of polymer on water/gas flow behavior in the microfractures of shale reservoirs. We fabricated six shale fracture models with different fracture widths and set up a core flooding apparatus to conduct brine/gas-injection experiments before and after polymer treatment. A method by which to calculate the residual resistance factor for gas (F_rr,gas) was defined. The experimental results …

Evaluation Of Preformed Particle Gel Treatment Using Homogeneous And Heterogeneous Models, Hilary Ogochukwu Elue

Masters Theses

"This research investigates the effects of preformed particle gel (PPG) in remedying the problems of excess water production and low oil recovery of heterogeneous reservoirs by placing the PPG in the high-permeability layer, thus diverting displacing brine to the unswept low permeability layer. This investigation was completed with three tasks.

The first task was to evaluate the PPG swelling kinetics and strength as a function of concentration of brine. The result of this task indicate that PPG prepared with low concentration of brine swells more, becomes weaker, more deformable than PPG prepared with high concentration of brine.

The second task …

Survey And Data Analysis Of Polymer Flooding Pilot And Field Applications In China, Yandong Zhang

Masters Theses

"Enhanced oil recovery (EOR) processes are regarded as important methods to recovery remaining oil after primary and secondary recovery. It is significant to select the most appropriate EOR process among the possible techniques for a candidate reservoir. EOR screening criteria has been created using available EOR datasets and served as the first step to compare the suitability of each EOR method for a particular reservoir. Most of these datasets are collected from EOR surveys published by Oil & Gas Journal. This study proposes a comprehensive study of a dataset including 55 pilot and field polymer flooding applications in China. Statistical …