Sharif Digital Repository

Increasing the global demand for energy and decreasing the production rate of oil reservoirs have forced the oil companies to focus on enhanced oil recovery (EOR) extensively. This paper summarizes the design, reservoir simulation, and results of different gas injection scenarios in one of the Iranian complex oil reservoirs. This complex reservoir is located in the south west of Iran and is made up of sandstone, limestone, and dolomite layers. It is an under saturated reservoir with no gas cap but with a strong aquifer. Oil production has started in 1977, but due to strong aquifer the production is still in the plateau period. In this study, by simulation, it is estimated that natural... 

Imbibition process is known to be an important recovery mechanism in naturally fractured reservoirs with water-wet matrix blocks that are imposed to water influx from an active aquifer or water flooding. Matrix blocks which are subjected to water flooding or water invasion from active aquifers do not become immersed in water at once, but they experience gradual rising of water in fracture. But most of imbibition studies are performed under conditions of totally immersed cores in static aqueous phase. Surfactants are known to reduce residual oil saturation by decreasing interfacial tension (IFT) between oil and water. On the other hand, considerable reduction of IFT due to surfactant... 

Accurate prediction of relative permeability for various reservoir rocks at various saturation conditions has been of concern for a long time in petroleum industry. Relative permeability is known as one of the most significant parameters in simulation of actual multi-phase flow through porous media during life-time of a hydrocarbon reservoir. In addition, it plays important role in oil production and well completion. Direct experimental measurement in order to determine relative permeability of porous rock has long been recorded in petroleum related literature. However, empirical methods for determining relative permeability are becoming more widely used, particularly with the advent of... 

The most common method of oil recovery is by displacement. By injecting water into wells, to push the oil to production wells, ultimately, the injected fluid breaks through at the production wells. Estimation of breakthrough time is important for the reservoir engineering calculation and the prediction of enhance recovery scenarios. Oil reservoirs are extremely complex, containing geological heterogeneities on all length scales which have a significant impact on hydrocarbon recovery. The conventional approach to investigate the reservoir performance is to build a detailed geological model, upscale it, and finally run flow simulation which is computationally very expensive. In... 

In this research oil production decline curve of heterogonous reservoirs was investigated. Heterogeneity is modeled by percolation theory and using Petrel software and mass balance equations are solved by Eclipse simulation software. In primary production stage which oil flows up the reservoir spontaneously by reservoir high internal pressure, decline curve is exponential. Changes in the characteristic parameter of the exponential decline curve with occupation probability and permeable objects size were investigated.In secondary production stage, after reducing the natural production potential of the reservoir, water injection is used to increase and stabilize the pressure and increase the... 

Fractured reservoirs contain about 85 percent of oil reservoirs and 90 percent of gas reservoirs in Iran. Full study of fractures as the main factor in fluid flow seem essential for these reservoirs. Recently a stochastic method based on the assumption that the elastic energy in the fractured media follows a Boltzmann distribution is proposed. The method utilizes an elastic energy function that sums the interactions of all pairs of fractures present in the model. The energy for each pair depends on the distance between the two fractures, their orientations, lengths and some other elastic medium properties. This objective function used in simulated annealing algorithm for generating fracture... 

In imbibition process, as one of the main mechanisms of recovery from naturally fractured reservoirs, a wetting fluid enters matrix blocks and produces nonwetting phase from blocks as result of interaction between capillary, gravity and viscous forces. Depending on various characteristics of system different types of imbibition like counter-current spontaneous imbibition, cocurrent spontaneous imbibition and dynamic counter-current imbibition could occur. In order to predict recovery from matrix blocks scaling equations can be used. In this thesis suitable scaling equations are presented for different types of imbibition by using analytical solutions. The studies cases are counter-current... 

One of the most important production mechanisms of fractured reservoirs is wettability alteration. Since most fractured reservoirs are carbonate, and thus are often oil-wet; production of these reservoirs is facing their special challenges. Since most of our country reservoirs are fractured carbonate type, determination of the exact mechanisms of their production is necessary. Thermal EOR methods traditionally have been welcomed by big oil companies. Also, these methods of enhanced oil recovery techniques, have a much greater share in the production history of all EOR methods, rather than other EOR methods. Exponentially decreasing of oil viscosity on heating, is the main reason for using... 

Water flooding is one of the improved oil recovery methods that has been used for past decades. The water flooding efficiency is calculated in two different scale; macroscopic scale and microscopic scale. The efficiency in macroscopic scale is called volume sweep efficiency (Ev) and in microscopic scale, displacement sweep efficiency (Ed). A special type of hydrocarbon reservoirs are composed of several permeable units in an impermeable shaley background in a way that hydrocarbon can just flow through the permeable units. The predominant feature of such reservoirs is continuity of permeable units that affecting the flow behavior. This simplification enables us to model such reservoirs by... 

Because of a lot of water, gas and polymer injection processes in industry, two phase flow simulation is very useful. So performing experimental work to find out fluid flow behavior in a small scale of reservoir has special importance. The results in various scales will differ because of heterogeneity and different dominant flow regimes. To see this effects, comparison of two small scales, namely core and micromodel scales, has been studied using the scale up methods. In literature review, the scale up procedure, relative permeability methods and dimensionless numbers in two phase flows has been described. Here the relative permeability and oil... 

Permeability is an essential parameter used for reservoir evaluation, simulation and management to optimize oil recovery. The conventional approach to estimate reservoir connectivity, conductivity, sweep efficiency and other critical information for decision-making is to build detailed geological models, which are then upscaled to a coarser grid where flow simulations are run. However, this takes many hours to be carried out even for a single realization practically. In practice, a very small number of realizations are considered and consequently the true uncertainty in the results is very poorly estimated. In this study, a statistical model of isotropic overlying sandbodies is used to... 

The most fundamental concept in considering electrical properties of reservoir rocks are formation Resistivity factor and Resistivity index which are defined by Archie and are useful in interpretation of well logging, evaluation of porosity and saturation. A theory on the relationship between formation resistivity factor and porosity, also resistivity index and saturation are presented by use of parameters Cementation factor and Saturation exponent. The Archie equation is valid only when the rock is strongly water-wet and clay free, which is not the case in carbonate rocks. Therefore the Archie equation cannot be generalized over the entire carbonate reservoirs. On the other hand influence... 

In fractured reservoirs under the gravity mechanism, the oil transfer between the matrix blocks is affected by mechanisms such as capillary continuity or re-imbibition. Capillary continuity between adjacent matrix blocks can be created by formation of liquid bridges, or physical contact of surfaces due to the roughness of the fracture wall surface.Since the presence of liquid bridges can be effective in creating capillary continuity and therefore the amount of oil production, the study of the presence of liquid bridges between matrix blocks and how they change in terms of volume and shape in the process of oil and gas movement is of particular importance. Although there are studies on the... 

Thermodynamic modeling is a useful method for predicting of asphaltene precipitation due to various reasons, such as CO2 injection, mixing of different oils in oil storage and pressure changes. However, the application of solid model and thermodynamic micellization model, for prediction of asphaltene precipitation under gas injection condition, hasnot been improved. In this work, two computer codes which are based on two different asphaltene precipitation thermodynamic models, 1-Thermodynamic Micellization Model and 2- Solid Model, have been developed, and, used for predicting of asphaltene precipitation data reported in the literature as well as the experimental data obtained from high... 

Hydrocarbon reservoirs may be classified on the basis of their drive mechanisms. In the reservoirs adjoined by water aquifers, waterdrive may be the primary production mechanism. The invasion of reservoir rock by aquifer water may have a significant impact on reservoir performance. Therefore, water influx into hydrocarbon reservoirs must be predicted accurately as a function of time, pressure history at the reservoir/aquifer interface, reservoir/aquifer size ratio, and aquifer characteristics.To forecast the performance in a waterdrive reservoir, an aquifer model simulating the fluid flow in the aquifer and flow from the aquifer into the reservoir is needed. Robust techniques for analysis of... 

There are a lot of Fractured reservoirs around the world that have large portion of oil production. These reservoirs have complex structure and fractures have important role in production but the remaining oil in matrix causes that the oil recovery decreases. One of the most important factors in these reservois are wettability. Because most of the fractured reservoirs are oil wet and water injection process in these reservoirs are not effective and chemical EOR methods such as surfactant flooding method is used. Surfactant improve oil recovery by two reasons: 1- reduction of interfacial tension between oil and water . 2-Wettability alteration of matrix. The porpose of this project is... 

As the published statistics of prestigious international institutes show, the share of natural gas from the energy basket of the world is rising. This increase is due to some reasons such as decrease in oil reserves, discovery of new gas fields, lower environmental problems, etc. The Islamic Republic of Iran is not an exception of this rule; but also because of huge gas reservoirs that Iran has, it becomes very important for the Iranian government. Hence, research for predicting the behavior of such reservoirs is a necessary need of oil and gas industry.Both thermodynamic and flow behavior of gas condensate fluids are more complicated than other reservoir fluids. Its complex thermodynamic... 

In gas-condensate reservoirs, when pressure reduces to less than dew point pressure, condensate will form out of the gas phase. Gas recycling is one of the most common methods to enhance the production of gas-condensate reservoirs.The purpose of this thesis is to optimize gas recycling process in a gas condensate reservoir in order to produce the accumulated condesate in the reservoir and maximize reservoir economic efficiency.The parameters that need optimization are:
• Injection gas ratio
• Injection gas allocation amongst injection wells
• Bottomhole pressure of production wells
Genetic algorithm was considered as optimization method and Proxy model is used in order to... 

Characteristic of the reservoir, including the important discussion in the oil industry, is widely practiced in the modeling, simulation and EOR. One of the methods fordetermining the specifications of the reservoir is geostatistical technique. This means that a large number of realizations of the reservoir model to assess the uncertainty in reservoir descriptions of performance predictions should be made.However flow simulation of all these realizations is very difficult due to cost and time calculations.To mend the problem, we use ranking realization that finally a minor number of realizations are selected and flow simulation is used to them.In this project, we use streamline simulation to... 

Aqueous phase trapping (APT) in many of the oil and gas reservoirs is a significant mechanism of formation damage during drilling, completion, work over, and stimulation operation. APT can limit the productivity of the well to a high extent, especially in low permeable gas reservoirs. Experimental investigation of factors affecting APT is vital to recognize extends of associated damage and contribution of each factor. Albeit many experimental studies have been conducted as regards factors affecting removal of phase traps in understudy mechanism of formation damage, but up to date no experimental data has been published regarding effect of different factors on reservoir’s potential for APT....