Application of Foam Floods for Enhancing Heavy Oil Recovery Through Stability Analysis and Core Flood Experiments

摘要

This work concerns the investigation of foam application to enhance heavy oil recovery through stability analysis tests, core floods, and data assessment. Monitoring transient behaviour of foam heights in a glass column showed that salt/alkaline concentration/type significantly affects the stability of foam. Meanwhile, the ionic nature of the surfactant and gas type also plays a crucial role. Therefore, the foam stability analysis should be helpful for the successful design of foam floods in enhanced oil recovery (EOR) processes. The surfactants that gave the most stable foam were used in core floods, and found that an increase in surfactant alternating gas (SAC) ratio decreases the oil recovery; furthermore, the efficiency of Cetrimonium Bromide (CTAB) is lower than that of Sodium Dodecyl Sulfate (SDS) in a sandstone core. Finally, the Leverage approach was used to assess the obtained data points of stability as well as core flooding tests through the developed least square supported vector machine (LS-SVM) models. It confirms the validity of experimental data.