Experimental Study of Water Displacement Rates on Remaining Oil Distribution and Oil Recovery in 2D Pore Network Model

Lingwen Meng and Binshan Ju
Additional contact information
Lingwen Meng: School of Energy Resources, China University of Geosciences (Beijing), Haidian District, Beijing 100083, China
Binshan Ju: School of Energy Resources, China University of Geosciences (Beijing), Haidian District, Beijing 100083, China

Energies, 2022, vol. 15, issue 4, 1-18

Abstract: An amount of oil remains in oil reservoirs even at the high water-cut stage of produced liquid from oil wells. To reveal the mechanism of displacement rates to affect the remaining oil in pore scales, a two-dimensional (2D) glass etching pore network model and real-time visual system were set up to observe the characteristics of oil distribution from water flooding and study the influence of displacement rates on oil recovery. It was found that the geometry of remaining oil in the pore network is diverse and dynamically changed at the high water-cut stage. Three geometric representative parameters were defined for the classification of five types of remaining oil (contiguous, branching, film, dropwise, bar columnar type), and controlling mechanisms for each type of remaining oil were analyzed. The experimental results show that the remaining oil saturation decreases from 21.2% to 6.5% when water injection rates increase from 0.05 to 0.5 mL/min. The increase in displacement rate improves the displacement efficiency of four types of remaining oil in the range of 55.00% to 93.67% except for dropwise type. The experimental data also indicate that the reduction in continuous residual oil and branched residual oil mainly contributes to the improvement of oil recovery of the whole network model. With the increase in displacement rate (from 0.05 to 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4, and 0.5 mL/min), the areas of five types of representative local residual oil reduce step by step. This research validates that the increase in water flooding rate in porous media leads to reduction in oil saturation, and it will improve oil recovery in oil reservoirs by enhancing water injection rates.

Keywords: pore network model; residual oil; displacement efficiency; water displacement rates; oil recovery (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/15/4/1501/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/15/4/1501/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jeners:v:15:y:2022:i:4:p:1501-:d:751890

Access Statistics for this article

Energies is currently edited by Ms. Agatha Cao

More articles in Energies from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().