The PI SPE Student Chapter Seminar
Investigation of Residual Oil Recovery Using EOR Methods:
Experiments in Micromodels and Packed Columns
by
Dr. Ioannis Chatzis1,2
Visiting Distinguished Professor
1Petroleum Engineering Department, The Petroleum Institute, Abu Dhabi, UAE
2Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
Monday, November 10, 2008
Room 2123, Bu Hasa
12:00 pm – 1:00pm
Abstract
A very significant fraction of the oil initially in place in an oil field remains trapped at the end of waterflooding operations. This trapped oil is referred to as the waterflood residual oil. The waterflood residual oil saturation is a strong function of the pore structure heterogeneities, flooding rate and wettability conditions. The residual oil saturation can be 15% of pore volume in homogeneous unconsolidated sands and as high as 50% of the pore volume in pore systems with isolated vugs and high aspect ratio of pore body size to pore throat size. Because of oil shortage globally, abandoned oil fields are revisited by oil companies to recover this residual oil by applying Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) techniques. The waterflood residual oil is recoverable by chemical flooding at high capillary number and by gravity assisted gas injection in waterflooded reservoirs. The capillary number is defined as the ratio of viscous to capillary forces. A key objective of this presentation is to develop a better understanding of the residual oil trapping and mobilization process and thus improve the design of chemical flooding projects in water-wet and oil-wet reservoirs. Improved Oil Recovery technologies in the UAE will become a reality very soon, as the producing oil fields will run out of the primary oil recovery phase.
Author’s biography
Ioannis Chatzis is Visiting Distinguished Professor in the Department of Petroleum Engineering at the Petroleum Institute. He is on sabbatical leave of absence from the University of Waterloo for the entire year of 2008 and he is a Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Waterloo, Canada. He received all his degrees from the University of Waterloo (B.A.Sc. 1974, M.A.Sc. 1976, and Ph.D. 1980). He jointed the University of Waterloo in 1982 as a faculty member and up to now, he has supervised 14 PhD students and 24 Master’s degree students. Currently he supervises 6 PhD students in progress and 3 master’s degree students. About half of his PhD students are in academia, the rest in research institutions and consulting. He teaches courses in Transport and Interfacial Phenomena, Reservoir Engineering, Flow in Porous Media, and Separation Processes. He is well known internationally for his research contributions on capillary and transport phenomena in porous media with applications to pore structure characterization and novel EOR processes for the in-situ recovery of heavy oil from tar sand deposits. He has published extensively and has received the “Darcy” Technical Achievement Award of the International Society of Core Analysts in 2006 for his contributions to the field of Core Analysis. He is an inventor with three patents and co-author of a textbook: Introduction to Equilibrium Stage Separations
