Simulation Study on New Scale up Methodologies Performance in Chemical Flooding

Chemical flooding is recognized as one of the most complicated process in Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) methods, so accurate simulation of chemical flooding requires a detailed understanding of numerous complex mechanisms and model parameters due to highly coupled, nonlinear interactions of many chemical and physical processes involved in chemical process. Enhanced oil recovery methods such as chemical flooding require laboratory analysis of the fluid flow through porous media and the determination of crucial parameters. Afterwards, the results of these studies must be analyzed in a field scale. Regarding the high cost and long time of flooding processes for laboratory models, application of various simulators to simulate these types of studies becomes clear. On the other hand, geological models with more than one million grid blocks are sometimes necessary to capture important geological features such as permeability and porosity distribution associated with an oil reservoir. Unfortunately, simulation of field scale flow using even with more advanced compositional reservoir simulators and current computing power are computationally intensive. In this paper, the effect of grid block size on the performance of Surfactant-Polymer (SP) flooding, and Surfactant (S) flooding for a synthetic layered reservoir is investigated. The simulation study is performed by a three-dimensional, multiphase, multi-component chemical flooding simulator. The effective propagation of the S and SP slug in the reservoir is very important to have high oil recovery efficiency. The larger the grid block size, the greater the surfactant dilution, which in turn dramatically reduces the effectiveness of the process. Simulation results show that the negative effect of using coarse grid simulation is more predominant on SP flooding rather than S flooding. Finally, two new approaches are used as a scale up methodology and their performance in the mentioned processes are explored. In addition, the results show that pseudo lower effective salinity approach is more effective to match coarse grid and fine gird simulation results.

کلیدواژه ها:

: Scale-up Methods ، Chemical Flooding ، Reservoir Simulation ، UTCHEM