Browsing by Subject "Steam foam"
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Item The effect of rock morphology on steam foam rheology(2019-05-08) Brame, Sean Dewaputra; Nguyen, Quoc P.The injection of steam as an enhanced oil recovery method to produce heavy oil is a mature technology. However, due to its high mobility, steam injection suffers from gravity override, viscous fingering, and loss to thief zones. Steam foam has been used to improve the sweep efficiency of steam injection processes. Steam foaming processes have been used successfully in the 1970s and 1980s, but more work has to be done to better understand and optimize the process for successful field implementation. Recent work has developed better surfactants for high-temperature foams above 200°C, but the physics of steam foam in varying reservoir conditions have been neglected. The purpose of this work was to study the change in the rheological behavior of steam foam in rocks with differing morphological properties, namely permeability and microheterogeneity. Based on the results of sand pack floods, it was concluded that permeability and foam quality govern the trend of apparent viscosity growth and decay for a given sand permeability. It was also determined that at high velocities, the shear thinning effect on steam foam is offset by new foam generation in heterogeneous sands. While the permeability of the sand more significantly influences foam viscosity, it was concluded that the microheterogeneity of a sand pack does affect foam dynamics. Experimentation with rock cores have proved to be more complex, and important limitations have been identified.