Masters Theses

Baihua Lin

Keywords and Phrases

Conformance Control; Heavy Oil; Microgel; Performance; Sand Filled Fracture

Abstract

“Preformed particle gels (PPG) has been widely applied for conformance control in heterogeneous reservoirs with fractures and super-K channels. As a plugging agent, PPG could plug the fractures or high permeability streaks and divert the displacing fluid into low permeability matrix. Many studies have been conducted to investigate the potential of PPGs as a water cut reduction and improved oil recovery agent using homogeneous sandpacks or heterogeneous core samples with man-made open fractures. However, no research has been carried out to understand how PPG injection and plugging performance will be changed if the fractures are filled with sands. Herein, the main objective of this work is to study the PPG plugging performance in a heterogeneous reservoir with a sandfilling fracture. To reach the objective, a core model with a sand-filling fracture was built to simulate the fractured reservoir. Three sizes of PPG with different swelling ratios were injected as a plugging agent. The gel migrations, pressure behaviors, oil recovery ratios and water cuts in different cases were recorded and analyzed. We found the gel injection pressure behaved as an up trending zigzag shape and was more sensitive to the gel swelling ratios than the particle sizes. Although the PPG plugging efficiency could be impaired by later chased polymer solution, the oil recovery showed an improvement of nearly 7% and a water cut reduction of 5% after gel treatment using the PPG with a larger swelling ratio. The gel migrations within the sand-filling fractures were observed by opening fractures after flooding tests. It showed that the gel with the lower swelling ratio did not play an effective role in plugging the pore spaces between sand grains, while the one with the higher swelling ratio had a positive effect on the plugging performance”--Abstract, page iii.

Advisor(s)

Bai, Baojun

Committee Member(s)

Flori, Ralph E.
Wei, Mingzhen

Department(s)

Geosciences and Geological and Petroleum Engineering

Degree Name

M.S. in Petroleum Engineering

Comments

The author extends thanks to United States Department of Energy (DOE) for the financial support.

Publisher

Missouri University of Science and Technology

Publication Date

Summer 2020

Pagination

xii, 88 pages

Note about bibliography

Includes bibliographic references (pages 84-87).

Rights

© 2020 Baihua Lin, All rights reserved.

Document Type

Thesis - Open Access

File Type

text

Language

English

Thesis Number

T 11681

Electronic OCLC #

1196831696

Download

Share

 
COinS