scholarly journals Efficient Oil Removal of Polymer Flooding Produced Sewerage Using Super-Hydrophobic Mesh Filtration Method

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 32
Author(s):  
Wanli Kang ◽  
Xin Kang ◽  
Hongbin Yang ◽  
Hailu Gebremariam ◽  
Zhe Li

During the past 20 years, polymer flooding has become a successful enhanced oil recovery (EOR) technique for mature reservoirs with high water cut and recovery percent around the world. However, the high bulk viscosity of polymer solutions could slow down the separation rate of the crude oil emulsion and make it difficult to treat the produced fluid. Consequently, the efficient removal of oil from the polymer flooding produced sewerage has still drawn significant concern. In this research, a high flux super-hydrophobic copper mesh was prepared using two-stage processes to treat the sewerage from polymer flooding. The surface of the super-hydrophobic mesh was characterized using various techniques including scanning electron microscope (SEM), OCA 20-contact angle goniometer, etc. Accordingly, the static contact angle of the super-hydrophobic copper mesh reached up to 165°. Moreover, the performances of the mesh were systematically evaluated under different internal and external factors such as oil to water volume ratio, polymer concentration, shear rate, and pH. The corresponding configuration and separation mechanisms are further explained in detail. The prepared superhydrophobic mesh can be a potential candidate for sewerage with both a polymer solution and crude oil.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rukaun Chai ◽  
Yuetian Liu ◽  
Qianjun Liu ◽  
Xuan He ◽  
Pingtian Fan

Abstract Unconventional reservoir plays an increasingly important role in the world energy system, but its recovery is always quite low. Therefore, the economic and effective enhanced oil recovery (EOR) technology is urgently required. Moreover, with the aggravation of greenhouse effect, carbon neutrality has become the human consensus. How to sequestrate CO2 more economically and effectively has aroused wide concerns. Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage (CCUS)-EOR is a win-win technology, which can not only enhance oil recovery but also increase CO2 sequestration efficiency. However, current CCUS-EOR technologies usually face serious gas channeling which finally result in the poor performance on both EOR and CCUS. This study introduced CO2 electrochemical conversion into CCUS-EOR, which successively combines CO2 electrochemical reduction and crude oil electrocatalytic cracking both achieves EOR and CCUS. In this study, multiscale experiments were conducted to study the effect and mechanism of CO2 electrochemical reduction for CCUS-EOR. Firstly, the catalyst and catalytic electrode were synthetized and then were characterized by using scanning electron microscope (SEM) & energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). Then, electrolysis experiment & liquid-state nuclear magnetic resonance (1H NMR) experiments were implemented to study the mechanism of CO2 electrochemical reduction. And electrolysis experiment & gas chromatography (GC) & viscosity & density experiments were used to investigate the mechanism of crude oil electrocatalytic cracking. Finally, contact angle and coreflooding experiments were respectively conducted to study the effect of the proposed technology on wettability and CCUS-EOR. SEM & EDS & XPS results confirmed that the high pure SnO2 nanoparticles with the hierarchical, porous structure, and the large surface area were synthetized. Electrolysis & 1H NMR experiment showed that CO2 has converted into formate with the catalysis of SnO2 nanoparticles. Electrolysis & GC & Density & Viscosity experiments indicated that the crude oil was electrocatalytically cracked into the light components (<C20) from the heavy components (C21∼C37). As voltage increases from 2.0V to 7.0V, the intensity of CO2 electrocchemical reduction and crude oil electrocatalytic cracking enhances to maximum at 3.5V (i.e., formate concentration reaches 6.45mmol/L and carbon peak decreases from C17 to C15) and then weakens. Contact angle results indicated that CO2 electrochemical reduction and crude oil electocatalytic cracking work jointly to promote wettability alteration. Thereof, CO2 electrochemical reduction effect is dominant. Coreflooding results indicated that CO2 electrochemical reduction technology has great potential on EOR and CCUS. With the SnO2 catalytic electrode at optimal voltage (3.5V), the additional recovery reaches 9.2% and CO2 sequestration efficiency is as high as 72.07%. This paper introduced CO2 electrochemical conversion into CCUS-EOR, which successfully combines CO2 electrochemical reduction and crude oil electrocatalytic cracking into one technology. It shows great potential on CCUS-EOR and more studies are required to reveal its in-depth mechanisms.


Polymers ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (6) ◽  
pp. 1046 ◽  
Author(s):  
Saeed Akbari ◽  
Syed Mohammad Mahmood ◽  
Hosein Ghaedi ◽  
Sameer Al-Hajri

Copolymers of acrylamide with the sodium salt of 2-acrylamido-2-methylpropane sulfonic acid—known as sulfonated polyacrylamide polymers—had been shown to produce very promising results in the enhancement of oil recovery, particularly in polymer flooding. The aim of this work is to develop an empirical model through the use of a design of experiments (DOE) approach for bulk viscosity of these copolymers as a function of polymer characteristics (i.e., sulfonation degree and molecular weight), oil reservoir conditions (i.e., temperature, formation brine salinity and hardness) and field operational variables (i.e., polymer concentration, shear rate and aging time). The data required for the non-linear regression analysis were generated from 120 planned experimental runs, which had used the Box-Behnken construct from the typical Response Surface Methodology (RSM) design. The data were collected during rheological experiments and the model that was constructed had been proven to be acceptable with the Adjusted R-Squared value of 0.9624. Apart from showing the polymer concentration as being the most important factor in the determination of polymer solution viscosity, the evaluation of the model terms as well as the Sobol sensitivity analysis had also shown a considerable interaction between the process parameters. As such, the proposed viscosity model can be suitably applied to the optimization of the polymer solution properties for the polymer flooding process and the prediction of the rheological data required for polymer flood simulators.


2020 ◽  
Vol 143 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mingchen Ding ◽  
Yugui Han ◽  
Yefei Wang ◽  
Yigang Liu ◽  
Dexin Liu ◽  
...  

Abstract It is generally accepted that polymer flooding gets less effective as the heterogeneity of a reservoir increases. However, very little experimental information or evidence has been collated to indicate which levels of heterogeneity correspond to reservoirs that can (and cannot) be efficiently developed using polymer flooding. Therefore, to experimentally determine a heterogeneity limit for the application of polymer flooding to reservoirs, a series of flow tests and oil displacements were conducted using parallel sand packs and visual models possessing different heterogeneities. For low-concentration polymer flooding (1.0 g/l), the limit determined corresponds to permeability contrasts (PCs) of 10.8 and 10.2, according to the parallel and visual tests, respectively. A significant increase in oil recovery can be achieved by polymer injection within these limits. Increasing the polymer concentration to 2.0 g/l increased these limiting PCs to 52.8 and 50.0, respectively. Additionally, within or beyond these limits, the combined use of polymer and gel may be the best.


Polymers ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (16) ◽  
pp. 2606
Author(s):  
Hossein Saberi ◽  
Ehsan Esmaeilnezhad ◽  
Hyoung Jin Choi

Polymer flooding is an important enhanced oil recovery (EOR) method with high performance which is acceptable and applicable on a field scale but should first be evaluated through lab-scale experiments or simulation tools. Artificial intelligence techniques are strong simulation tools which can be used to evaluate the performance of polymer flooding operation. In this study, the main parameters of polymer flooding were selected as input parameters of models and collected from the literature, including: polymer concentration, salt concentration, rock type, initial oil saturation, porosity, permeability, pore volume flooding, temperature, API gravity, molecular weight of the polymer, and salinity. After that, multilayer perceptron (MLP), radial basis function, and fuzzy neural networks such as the adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system were adopted to estimate the output EOR performance. The MLP neural network had a very high ability for prediction, with statistical parameters of R2 = 0.9990 and RMSE = 0.0002. Therefore, the proposed model can significantly help engineers to select the proper EOR methods and API gravity, salinity, permeability, porosity, and salt concentration have the greatest impact on the polymer flooding performance.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 186
Author(s):  
Yukie Tanino ◽  
Amer Syed

We designed a hands-on laboratory exercise to demonstrate why injecting an aqueous polymer solution into an oil reservoir (commonly known as “polymer flooding”) enhances oil production. Students are split into three groups of two to three. Each group is assigned to a packed Hele–Shaw cell pre-saturated with oil, our laboratory model of an oil reservoir, and is given an aqueous solution of known polymer concentration to inject into the model reservoir to “push” the oil out. At selected intervals, students record the oil produced, take photos of the cell using their smartphones, and demarcate the invading polymer front on an acetate sheet. There is ample time for students to observe the experiments of other groups and compare the different flow patterns that arise from different polymer concentrations. Students share their results with other groups at the end of the session, which require effective data presentation and communication. Both the in-session tasks and data sharing require team work. While this experiment was designed for a course on Enhanced Oil Recovery for final year undergraduate and MSc students in petroleum engineering, it can be readily adapted to courses on groundwater hydrology or subsurface transport by selecting different test fluids.


SPE Journal ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 22 (02) ◽  
pp. 417-430 ◽  
Author(s):  
Saeid Khorsandi ◽  
Changhe Qiao ◽  
Russell T. Johns

Summary Polymer flooding can significantly improve sweep and delay breakthrough of injected water, thereby increasing oil recovery. Polymer viscosity degrades in reservoirs with high-salinity brines, so it is advantageous to inject low-salinity water as a preflush. Low-salinity waterflooding (LSW) can also improve local-displacement efficiency by changing the wettability of the reservoir rock from oil-wet to more water-wet. The mechanism for wettability alteration for LSW in sandstones is not very well-understood; however, experiments and field studies strongly support that cation-exchange (CE) reactions are the key elements in wettability alteration. The complex coupled effects of CE reactions, polymer properties, and multiphase flow and transport have not been explained to date. This paper presents the first analytical solutions for the coupled synergistic behavior of LSW and polymer flooding considering CE reactions, wettability alteration, adsorption, inaccessible pore volume (IPV), and salinity effects on polymer viscosity. A mechanistic approach that includes the CE of Ca2+, Mg2+, and Na+ is used to model the wettability alteration. The aqueous phase viscosity is a function of polymer and salt concentrations. Then, the coupled multiphase-flow and reactive-transport model is decoupled into three simpler subproblems—the first in which CE reactions are solved, the second in which a variable polymer concentration can be added to the reaction path, and the third in which fractional flows can be mapped onto the fixed cation and polymer-concentration paths. The solutions are used to develop a front-tracking algorithm, which can solve the slug-injection problem of low-salinity water as a preflush followed by polymer. The results are verified with experimental data and PennSim (2013), a general-purpose compositional simulator. The analytical solutions show that decoupling allows for estimation of key modeling parameters from experimental data, without considering the chemical reactions. Recovery can be significantly enhanced by a low-salinity preflush before polymer injection. For the cases studied, the improved oil recovery (IOR) for a chemically tuned low-salinity polymer (LSP) flood can be as much as 10% original oil in place (OOIP) greater than with considering polymer alone. The results show the structure of the solutions, and, in particular, the velocity of multiple shocks that develop. These shocks can interact, changing recovery. For example, poor recoveries obtained in corefloods for small-slug sizes of low salinity are explained by the intersection of shocks without considering mixing. The solutions can also be used to benchmark numerical solutions and for experimental design. We demonstrate the potential of LSP flooding as a less-expensive and more-effective way for performing polymer flooding when the reservoir wettability can be altered with chemically tuned low-salinity brine.


2013 ◽  
Vol 647 ◽  
pp. 144-149
Author(s):  
Yue Hui She ◽  
Fan Zhang ◽  
Bo Xun Liang ◽  
Zheng Liang Wang ◽  
Long Jiang Yu

A delayed cross linked gel profile control agent is used to plug high permeable formations. Also, well nutrient fluid and microbes are injected with 50% of the heavy residual oil, after polymer flooding, in order to improve oil recovery due to the complex environment of oil reservoirs. Four strains of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon-degrading bacteria are selected from oilfield produced water with a high efficiency. Two of the four strains, namely BISYX17 and BISYX14, are new. Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon-degrading bacteria have high growth activity and they are able to reach a maximum stain concentration after being cultured 4 to 8 days, using phenanthrene as their sole carbon source. They are able to effectively degrade heavy hydrocarbon with a phenanthrene degradation rate of up to 80%, after the sample is cultured for seven days. Strain BISYX7 has the strongest phenanthrene -degrading ability, with a maximum degradation percentage of 89.89%. The strains are capable of producing dioxygenase to open rings of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon. The dioxygenase activity, produced by BISYX17, is able to reach 40.2 IU/mg, which is higher than the enzyme activities of a wild strain. This shows the strain has excellent potential to produce enzymes. Enzymes, produced by metabolism, have a direct degradation rate of 68% on crude oil. A core displacement simulation experiment indicates a profile control oil-displacing system is able to improve crude oil recovery efficiency by 17%, after polymer flooding. Thus, the system has excellent application potential for residual oil recovery.


1975 ◽  
Vol 15 (04) ◽  
pp. 338-346 ◽  
Author(s):  
M.T. Szabo

Abstract Numerous polymer floods were performed in unconsolidated sand packs using a C14-tagged, cross-linked, partially hydrolyzed ployacrylamide, and the data are compared with brine-flood performance in the same sands. performance in the same sands. The amount of "polymer oil" was linearly proportional to polymer concentration up to a proportional to polymer concentration up to a limiting value. The upper limit of polymer concentration yielding additional polymer oil was considerably higher for a high-permeability sand than for a low-permeability sand. It is shown that a minimum polymer concentration exists, below which no appreciable polymer oil can be produced in high-permeability sands. The effect of polymer slug size on oil recovery is shown for various polymer concentrations, and the results from these tests are used to determine the optimum slug size and polymer concentration for different sands. The effect of salinity was studied by using brine and tap water during polymer floods under similar conditions. Decreased salinity resulted in improved oil recovery at low, polymer concentrations, but it had little effect at higher polymer concentrations. Polymer injection that was started at an advanced stage of brine flood also improved the oil recovery in single-layered sand packs. Experimental data are presented showing the effect of polymer concentration and salinity on polymer-flood performance in stratified reservoir polymer-flood performance in stratified reservoir models. Polymer concentrations in the produced water were measured by analyzing the radioactivity of effluent samples, and the amounts of retained polymer in the stratified models are given for each polymer in the stratified models are given for each experiment. Introduction In the early 1960's, a new technique using dilute polymer solutions to increase oil recovery was polymer solutions to increase oil recovery was introduced in secondary oil-recovery operations. Since then, this new technique has attained wide-spread commercial application. The success and the complexity of this new technology has induced many authors to investigate many aspects of this flooding technique. Laboratory and field studies, along with numerical simulation of polymer flooding, clearly demonstrated that polymer additives increase oil recovery. polymer additives increase oil recovery. Some of the laboratory results have shown that applying polymers in waterflooding reduces the residual oil saturation through an improvement in microscopic sweep efficiency. Other laboratory studies have shown that applying polymer solutions improves the sweep efficiency in polymer solutions improves the sweep efficiency in heterogeneous systems. Numerical simulation of polymer flooding, and a summary of 56 field applications, clearly showed that polymer injection initiated at an early stage of waterflooding is more efficient than when initiated at an advanced stage. Although much useful information has been presented, the experimental conditions were so presented, the experimental conditions were so variable that difficulties arose in correlating the numerical data. So, despite this good data, a systematic laboratory study of the factors influencing the performance of polymer flooding was still lacking in the literature. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of polymer concentration, polymer slug size, salinity in the polymer bank, initial water saturation, and permeability on the performance of polymer floods. The role of oil viscosity did not constitute a subject of this investigation. However, some of the data indicated that the applied polymer resulted in added recovery when displacing more viscous oil. The linear polymer-flood tests were coupled with tests in stratified systems, consisting of the same sand materials used in linear flood tests. Thus, it was possible to differentiate between the role of polymer in mobility control behind the flood front in each layer and its role in mobility control in the entire stratified system through improvement in vertical sweep efficiency. A radioactive, C14-tagged hydrolyzed polyacrylamide was used in all oil-recovery tests. polyacrylamide was used in all oil-recovery tests. SPEJ P. 338


2013 ◽  
Vol 2013 ◽  
pp. 1-6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hong-sheng Liu ◽  
Jing-qin Wang ◽  
Li Yang ◽  
Dong-yang Jiang ◽  
Chang-sen Lv ◽  
...  

In order to study the effects of oil displacement by a foam system of ultralow interfacial tension, the interfacial activities and foam properties of a nonionic gemini surfactant (DWS) were investigated under Daqing Oilfield reservoir conditions. Injection methods and alternate cycle of the foam system were discussed here on the basis of results from core flow experiments. It was obtained that the surface tension of DWS was approximately 25 mN/m, and ultralow interfacial tension was reached between oil and DWS with a surfactant concentration between 0.05wt% and 0.4wt%. The binary system showed splendid foam performances, and the preferential surfactant concentration was 0.3wt% with a polymer concentration of 0.2wt%. When gas and liquid were injected simultaneously, flow control capability of the foam reached its peak at the gas-liquid ratio of 3 : 1. Enhanced oil recovery factor of the binary foam system exceeded 10% in a parallel natural cores displacement after polymer flooding.


2012 ◽  
Vol 2012 ◽  
pp. 1-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yang Lei ◽  
Shurong Li ◽  
Xiaodong Zhang ◽  
Qiang Zhang ◽  
Lanlei Guo

Polymer flooding is one of the most important technologies for enhanced oil recovery (EOR). In this paper, an optimal control model of distributed parameter systems (DPSs) for polymer injection strategies is established, which involves the performance index as maximum of the profit, the governing equations as the fluid flow equations of polymer flooding, and some inequality constraints as polymer concentration and injection amount limitation. The optimal control model is discretized by full implicit finite-difference method. To cope with the discrete optimal control problem (OCP), the necessary conditions for optimality are obtained through application of the calculus of variations and Pontryagin’s discrete maximum principle. A modified gradient method with new adjoint construction is proposed for the computation of optimal injection strategies. The numerical results of an example illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.


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