TY - GEN
T1 - Microemulsion phase behavior model using empirical trends in chemical potentials
AU - Torrealba, V. A.
AU - Johns, R. T.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
Copyright © 2017, SPE International Conference on Oilfield Chemistry.
PY - 2017
Y1 - 2017
N2 - Surfactant-based enhanced oil recovery methods have been a promising technique for the last several decades due to the surfactant's ability to mobilize previously trapped oil by significantly reducing capillary forces at the pore-scale. However, the field-implementation of these techniques have been challenged by the high cost of chemicals, which makes the margin of error for the deployment of such methods increasingly narrow. Some commonly recognized issues are surfactant adsorption, surfactant partitioning to the excess phases, thermal and physical degradation, and scale-representative phase behavior. Recent contributions to the petroleum engineering literature have used the hydrophilic-lipophilic difference net-average curvature (HLD-NAC) model to develop a phase behavior EoS to fit experimental data and predict phase behavior away from tuned data. The model currently assumes spherical micelles, which may yield errors in the bicontinuous region where micelles transition into cylindrical and planar shapes. In this paper, we introduce a new empirical phase behavior model based on chemical potentials and HLD that eliminates NAC so that spherical micelles are no longer assumed. The model is able to describe physical two-phase regions, and is shown to represent accurately experimental data at fixed composition and changing HLD (e.g. A salinity scan) as well as compositional data at fixed HLD. Further, the model is extended to account for surfactant partitioning into the excess phases. The model is benchmarked against experimental data, showing excellent fits for a wide variety of experiments, and is compared to the HLDNAC EoS model for reference.
AB - Surfactant-based enhanced oil recovery methods have been a promising technique for the last several decades due to the surfactant's ability to mobilize previously trapped oil by significantly reducing capillary forces at the pore-scale. However, the field-implementation of these techniques have been challenged by the high cost of chemicals, which makes the margin of error for the deployment of such methods increasingly narrow. Some commonly recognized issues are surfactant adsorption, surfactant partitioning to the excess phases, thermal and physical degradation, and scale-representative phase behavior. Recent contributions to the petroleum engineering literature have used the hydrophilic-lipophilic difference net-average curvature (HLD-NAC) model to develop a phase behavior EoS to fit experimental data and predict phase behavior away from tuned data. The model currently assumes spherical micelles, which may yield errors in the bicontinuous region where micelles transition into cylindrical and planar shapes. In this paper, we introduce a new empirical phase behavior model based on chemical potentials and HLD that eliminates NAC so that spherical micelles are no longer assumed. The model is able to describe physical two-phase regions, and is shown to represent accurately experimental data at fixed composition and changing HLD (e.g. A salinity scan) as well as compositional data at fixed HLD. Further, the model is extended to account for surfactant partitioning into the excess phases. The model is benchmarked against experimental data, showing excellent fits for a wide variety of experiments, and is compared to the HLDNAC EoS model for reference.
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U2 - 10.2118/184555-ms
DO - 10.2118/184555-ms
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85050802338
T3 - Proceedings - SPE International Symposium on Oilfield Chemistry
SP - 482
EP - 497
BT - Society of Petroleum Engineers - SPE International Conference on Oilfield Chemistry 2017
PB - Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE)
T2 - SPE International Conference on Oilfield Chemistry 2017
Y2 - 3 April 2017 through 5 April 2017
ER -