Laboratory Investigation of Foam Stability Enhancement using Nanoparticles, Surfactant and Xanthan Biopolymer to Enhance Oil Recovery

The growing demand of the world for energy has caused to exploit the non-renewable resources using best techniques to enhance the recovery. Gas injection is one of the most common techniques in the exploitation of reservoir’s hydrocarbon. In addition, carbon dioxide is used widely for gas injection processes in oil reservoirs due to the good results obtained by executing numerous field projects. It should be noted that there exist problems in the process of gas injection into reservoirs. Low density and viscosity of gas is caused unfavorable movement of gas in the porous environment as well as early gas breakthrough in production wells. These factors cause gravitational separation as well as fingering phenomenon in reservoirs. To reduce gas injection problems, foam is replaced instead of gas as injecting material. Implementing the foam injection techniques would result better sweeping efficiency than solely gas flooding since foam has a higher apparent viscosity than gas. Fingering and early breakthrough of gas are reduced by foam injection in oilfields. In this research, by using deionized water at atmospheric temperature and pressure, in the first step, the foaming ability of the designed solutions was investigated. At a critical concentration of 0.24% (weight percent of surfactant), the effect of various parameters on the foaming ability were investigated. In addition, the stability of these solutions were measured based on the foam half-life and the optimal parameters of the different solution were determined to be injected into the micromodel. At the end, the solution obtained from the optimal parameters was prepared for running the injection scenarios. Then the amount of produced oil for different solutions was evaluated by micromodel experiments. It should be stated that presence of silica nanoparticles increased the half-life of the foam by about 25%. In addition, adding the Xanthan gum polymer to injecting foam structure along with the silica nanoparticle increased foam half-life to about 60%.