Sharif Digital Repository

This work aims to discuss the results of wide ranges of laboratory investigations to evaluate the performance of a newly-formulated surfactant for heavy oil reservoirs in order to improve the microscopic sweep efficiency after water flooding processes. In the first part, the specific behavior of the formulated surfactant including its salinity tolerance, interfacial tension, and optimum performance window was determined. Then, the application of surfactant solutions in real sandstone reservoir rocks was assessed for both oil-wet and water-wet cases. Besides, the effect of changing the capillary and viscous forces and interfacial tension on the residual phase saturations were characterized.... 

Not only should dams be evaluated for seismic shaking, but their capability to survive potential fault displacement in their foundations should also be assessed. Safety reviews of existing dams suggest that geological-seismic evaluation of some dam sites has failed to recognize the existence of possibly active faults. In this study, the nonlinear seismic behavior of concrete gravity dams, due to relative fault dislocation occurring in foundations, has been investigated. Two types of fault movement, including normal-slip and reverse-slip, have been considered. These two types, combined with the location of fault lines, with respect to the toe, middle, and heel of the dam base, angle of fault,... 

This work concerns simultaneous determination of relative permeability, capillary pressure, pore size distribution (PSD), and residual oil saturation data by optimization of well testing data, and introduces a new capillary pressure relationship, based on the Weibull distribution function, for direct determination of the PSD function from capillary pressure parameters. Three consecutive injection, fall off, and production well tests are performed on a predefined synthetic reservoir through simulation, and an optimization algorithm is used to find the parameters of relative permeability and capillary pressure curves as well as the value of residual oil saturation. The PSD function is also... 

As the oil production from conventional oil reservoirs is decreasing, oil production through Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) processes is supposed to compensate for both the oil production reduction in matured oil reservoirs and the worldwide dramatic increase in oil demand. Therefore, developing a strategy to choose an optimized EOR technique is crucial to find a resolution for production decline in oil reservoirs. A screening tool recommending the most appropriate EOR method is proposed in this study. An expert fuzzy logic system is employed to screen four well-known EOR methods including miscible CO2 injection, miscible HC gas injection, polymer flooding and steam injection based on the... 

The use of polymer flooding as one of enhanced oil recovery methods has recently increased. The occurrence of high shear rates in reservoir and near well bore through perforation nozzles during polymer flooding cause shear degradation of polymers and therefore polymer viscosity has decreased. Rheological behavior of polymer solution in different conditions of oil reservoir is one of the key factors to develop use of polymer solutions. A few researches are available regarding improving rheological behavior of polymeric solution. In this study, to investigate the effect of nanoparticles on rheological behavior of polymer solutions two samples were prepared: polyacrylamide solution in water and... 

This paper addresses the impacts of climate change on hydrology and water resources in the Karkheh River Basin (KRB), which is the third most productive basin in Iran and has great potential for hydropower generation. The total potential capacity of reservoirs in this basin is more than 15 ×109 Mm3, of which 40% has been built. The sensitivity of the KRB to potential climate change is investigated by simulating basin streamflow response under different climate change scenarios. A conceptual rainfall-runoff model (IHACRES) was first calibrated by using hydrological and streamflow observations. The model was then applied by downscaling two general circulation model outputs (CGCM3 and HadCM3)... 

In the present paper, spatially variation input effects on seismic responses of arch dams have been studied. Recorded ground accelerations at the dam foundation interface of Pacoima dam during January 13, 2001 were used for the purpose of this investigation. A numerical finite element model was developed for dynamic analysis of the dam reservoir system. The modified version of NSAD-DRI finite element program was used for the analysis and the ground acceleration time histories were interpolated at all dam foundation interface nodal points. Total and pseudo static displacements as well as developed stresses due to uniform and non uniform excitations are obtained. The results reveal that... 

Iran's proved natural gas reserves are the world's second largest. Mainly, because of climate changes and different reservoirs' characterizations, studying the behavior of production fluids and their transportation is essential. One of the main problems which occurs in the gas reservoirs is related to the hydrate formation while producing from a well, either in production strings or production lines (before and after choke). Effective parameters which influence the formation of hydrates are: high pressure, low temperature and water presence; and therefore, the high possibility of having this phenomenon in Iranian reservoirs is quite obvious especially in cold climates and for gas wells.... 

The authors studied the efficiency and accuracy of neural network model for prediction of permeability as a key parameter in reservoir characterization. So, some multilayer perceptron (MLP) neural network models with different learning algorithms of Levenberg-Margnardt, back propagation, improved back propagation (IBP), and quick propagation with three layers and different node numbers (3, 4, 5, 6, 7) in the middle layer have been presented. These models have been obtained by 630 permeability data from one of offshore reservoirs located in Saudi Arabia. The accuracy of models was studied by comparing the obtained results of each model with experimental data. So, the neural network with IBP... 

This paper investigates the efficiency and performance of several of the fiooding techniques popular in secondary and enhanced oil recovery. These processes include water fiooding, immiscible and miscible gas fiooding, and several forms of water-alternating-gas (WAG) injection. The study is carried out numerically on a typical one-dimensional domain using an advanced high-resolution central scheme. Some performance indices such as oil cut drop, breakthrough time, and sweep efficiency were employed to evaluate the appropriateness of each injection strategy  

A depleted naturally fractured gas condensate reservoir with extremely tight matrix permeability in the center of Iran is used for gas storage. Due to the tightness of the matrix, simulation of this process may present a unique challenge in terms of the importance of diffusion process in flow behavior of the injected gas in matrix blocks. This article presents a multimechanistic (Darcian-type flow and Fickian-type flow) mathematical model to investigate the importance of diffusion process as a function of important rock and fluid parameters. The authors' approach consists of the following steps: (a) development of a 1-D governing equations for a single matrix block consists of a gas... 

Although alkaline-surfactant-polymer flooding is proved to be efficient for oil recovery from heavy oil reservoirs, the displacements mechanism/efficiency of this process in fractured systems needs to more discussion, especially in five-spot patterns. In this work, several ASP flooding test were performed on fractured micromodels which were initially saturated with heavy oil at constant flow rate and different fracture geometrical characteristics conditions. The ASP solutions are constituted from 5 polymers i.e. four synthetic polymers include three hydrolyzed polyacrylamide with different molecular weight as well as a non-hydrolyzed polyacrylamide and a biopolymer, 2 surfactants i.e. a... 

Toe to heel air injection has been studied on non-fractured sandstone models and is found to be a promising enhanced oil recovery method for certain heavy oil reservoirs, such as those in Canada, but its applicability on fractured reservoirs, such as those in the Middle East, is not investigated yet. The objective of this article is to evaluate the effect of fractures geometrical parameters, such as fracture density, orientation, and location, on the performance of the process in laboratory scale. Simulation results showed that toe-to-heel air injection is more applicable on highly networked fractured reservoirs, such as those that occur in Persian Gulf coast compared to lower density... 

In this work effect of composition changes of injection gas, CH4 + CO2, on the performance of immiscible WAG injection in light oil, 41 oAPI, which has been rarely attended in the available literature is investigated. Presence of CO2 helps to reduce the MMP of CH4 significantly. Core flood experiments are conducted at reservoir conditions and fixed flow rate of 0.5cc/min on a sandstone sample with the brine concentration of 5000 ppm, and the influence of injection gas composition as well as WAG ratio on oil recovery is investigated. Different mole percents of methane in mixture, 0%, to 100% are examined, and the tests continued to ten alternate cycles with a slug size of 0.1 pore volumes and... 

This work examines the operational parameters that may influence the performance of toe-to-heel steamflooding in a laboratory-scale simulation model built on the basis of the fluid and rock samples from a fractured, low-permeable, carbonate heavy oil reservoir in Southwestern Iran, called KEM (Kuh-e-Mond). Using vertical (V) or horizontal (H) injectors (I) and producers (P), the effects of different well configurations including VIVP, VIHP, 2VIHP, VI2HP, HIHP, and HI2HP, injectors' traversal distance, producers' traversal distance, and horizontal producer length have been investigated. In summary, the results show that 2VIHP scheme performs best in terms of oil recovery and areal/volumetric... 

Water resources limitation in arid and semi arid regions on one hand and water demand increase on the other, have made the optimum utilization of existing water resources and systems necessary. In this context, researchers are trying to increase the accuracy and lag time of prediction by using various statistic and empirical models as well as different local and long-range variables in the last decades. Karoon River is the greatest and most important river in Iran because of agricultural water demand supply and hydroelectric power production. Therefore streamflow prediction of this river has considerable economical and social benefits. In this study the relationship between Karoon stramflow... 

Flood control as an important purpose of reservoir systems faces a wide range of natural, social and political challenges, mainly due to different uncertainties. Over the time, these uncertainties call for necessary changes in the original plan of the systems. Therefore, construction of new flood control systems as well as the storage reallocation and reservoir reoperation of existing ones are essential for adapting the systems to new information, conditions and policies. Furthermore, multipurpose nature of the multi-reservoir systems requires considering conflicts among various purposes. In this paper, a multiobjective optimization model is developed for analyzing such conflicts in a... 

Abstract Miscible carbon dioxide (CO2) flooding has become the most commonly and favorable approach in Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) because of its high oil reservoir sweep efficiency and contribution to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Despite this, it can significantly favor the asphaltene deposition, which leads to the wettability reversal and formation damage. A novel experimental setup was utilized to study asphaltene deposition on the model rock at reservoir condition. The evolution of asphaltene deposition was monitored by a microscope; then analyzed by image processing software to check the amount of deposited asphaltene and its size distribution at different... 

Spontaneous imbibition, defined as the displacement of nonwetting phase by wetting phase in porous media by action of capillary forces, is important in many applications within earth sciences and in particular in naturally fractured oil and gas reservoirs. Hence, it is critical to investigate the various aspects of this process to correctly model the fractured reservoir behavior. In this study, twenty four experiments were conducted to study the effect of rock properties, lithology of porous medium, brine viscosity and boundary conditions on displacement rate and final recovery by cocurrent spontaneous imbibition (COCSI) in brine-oil systems. The results can be extended to brine-gas systems,... 

This work aims to discuss the results of wide ranges of laboratory investigations to evaluate the performance of a newly-formulated surfactant for heavy oil reservoirs in order to improve the microscopic sweep efficiency after water flooding processes. In the first part, the specific behavior of the formulated surfactant including its salinity tolerance, interfacial tension, and optimum performance window was determined. Then, the application of surfactant solutions in real sandstone reservoir rocks was assessed for both oil-wet and water-wet cases. Besides, the effect of changing the capillary and viscous forces and interfacial tension on the residual phase saturations were characterized....