Visualization Investigation of Foam Injection in a Transparent Fractured Porous Medium

Naturally fractured reservoir account for 20% of world’s oil reserves, in these reservoirs conductivity is mostly in the fracture network while the oil is mostly in the matrix and after primary recovery most of oil remains in the reservoir also most of secondary or tertiary recovery methods such as water injection or gas injection are not efficient in fractured reservoirs. One of the remedy methods to control and improve volumetric sweep efficiency is foam injection. Foam in porous media is a dispersed gaseous phase within a continuous aqueous phase comprised mainly of thin films known as lamellae. The lamellae are stabilized by adsorption of surfactant at the gas/liquid interfaces. In this paper, experiments were performed to study the pertinent oil displacement mechanisms during gas and foam injection in a transparent fractured porous medium. Transparent material such as glass was used to construct micromodels and to study various aspects of fluid displacement at pore scale. By using micromodels, the displacement of the fluids can be observed and investigated in terms of micro-geometry and physical characteristics of the presented liquids, gases, and solids

Keywords:

Naturally fractured reservoir , gas injection , foam , and micromodel