A Practical Methodology to Screen Oil Recovery Processes Involving Spontaneous Imbibition

Oil Recovery by Spontaneous Imbibition from Weakly Water-Wet Rocks

Spontaneous imbibition is of special importance to oil recovery from fractured reservoirs. Laboratory measurements of volume of liquid imbibed versus time are often used in the prediction of oil recovery. Imbibition measurements also provide a useful approach to the complex problem of characterizing the wetting properties of porous media. Correlation of a large body of data for imbibition of br...

Recovery of Oil in Limestone with Cationic Surfactant: Investigation of the Adsorption, Wettability, and Spontaneous Imbibition

The performance of petroleum recovery methods is dependent on the characteristics of the reservoir rock, oil quality, and formation water. One fundamental feature for considering petroleum recovery methods is the wettability of the rock reservoir. Also, this feature impacts the displacement of fluids in the rock reservior. In the case of the limestone, which normally features oil wettability, e...

Kinematical description of the spontaneous imbibition processes

A set of experiments of spontaneous imbibition for water displacing oil or a mixture of water and glycerine displacing oil, on flat and rectangular Hele-Shaw cells, is reported. Visualization of the imbibition process allowed the knowledge of the evolution of three basic kinematical variables: the active oil area, the interfacial length and the mean velocity of displacement. A derived kinematic...

Interface pinning in spontaneous imbibition.

Evaporation and gravity induced pinning in spontaneous imbibition are examined within a phase field formalism. Evaporation is introduced via a nonconserving term and gravity through a convective term that constrains the influx of liquid. Their effects are described by dimensionless coupling constants epsilon and g, respectively. From liquid conservation, the early time behavior of the average i...

Advances in Enhanced Oil Recovery Processes