(201b) A Microfluidics Based Study on the Effect of Immiscible Huff-n-Puff Process on Residual Oil Saturation in Hydrophilic and Hydrophobic Porous Media
AIChE Annual Meeting
2018
2018 AIChE Annual Meeting
Upstream Engineering and Flow Assurance Forum
Poster Session: Upstream Engineering and Flow Assurance
Monday, October 29, 2018 - 3:30pm to 5:00pm
Uniform pore network chips with hydrophilic and hydrophobic wetting surfaces and aspect ratios ranging from 1.97 to 23.94 were used. In this study, the aspect ratio was defined as the ratio of the maximum cross-sectional area of the pore and that of the throat, both measured perpendicular to the flow direction. Water, n-decane, and CH4 were used as aqueous, oil, and gas phases, respectively. The aqueous and oil phases were dyed with methyl blue and Sudan red, separately to increase visual contrast for enhanced fluid saturation measurements.
In each experiment, a microfluidics chip was first saturated with water then oil to achieve the initial saturations. It was then flooded with water and gas to achieve residual fluid saturations before pressure reduction steps in âHuff-n-Puffâ. Water and gas injection rates were adjusted to maintain capillary numbers in the range of 10-7 to 10-5, to match values of reservoirs. A constant back pressure of 100 psig was maintained before âHuff-n-Puffâ started. Four pressure reduction steps were performed by reducing the back pressure by 25 psig in each step. Chip and pore scale images were taken, and analyzed using ImageJ software to measure the residual fluid saturations.
For the continuous gas flooding prior to âHuff-n-Puffâ, the results show that the oil saturation increases semi-logarithmically with aspect ratio (log AR vs. Sorg) for both hydrophilic and hydrophobic chips. During the four âHuff-n-Puffâ steps, up to 20 %PV oil was produced in hydrophilic chips, whereas less than 5 %PV of oil was produced in hydrophobic chips.