For help in preparation of this article, thanks to Austin Boyd, Gabriela Leu and Romain Prioul, Boston; Ray Kennedy, Edmonton; Patrice Ligneul, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia; John McCullagh, Sugar Land, Texas, USA; Guillemette Picard, Clamart, France; Raghu Ramamoorthy, Abu Dhabi, UAE; and Alan Sibbit, Moscow. Thanks also to the participants of the May 2007 Schlumberger Wettability Workshop, Bahrain. E...

Introduction Copyright 2004, Society of Petroleum Engineers Inc. There are many aspects of hydrocarbon production processes where understanding the flow of non-Newtonian fluids in porous media is of great interest. These include well drilling and construction, reservoir stimulation and production. In particular, complex polymeric solutions have been used for water-control purposes or to enhanc...

Assessment of the potential of a polymer flood for mobility control requires an accurate model on the viscosities of displacement fluids involved in the process. Because most polymers used in EOR exhibit shear-thinning behavior, the effective viscosity of a polymer solution is a highly nonlinear function of shear rate. A reservoir simulator including the model for the shear-rate dependence of v...

BACKGROUND Microorganisms have long been associated with oxic and anoxic degradation of hydrocarbons in oil reservoirs and oil production facilities. While we can readily determine the abundance of microorganisms in the reservoir and study their activity in the laboratory, it has been challenging to resolve what microbes are actively participating in crude oil degradation in situ and to gain in...

Our understanding of the processes underlying the formation of heavy oil has been transformed in the last decade. The process was once thought to be driven by oxygen delivered to deep petroleum reservoirs by meteoric water. This paradigm has been replaced by a view that the process is anaerobic and frequently associated with methanogenic hydrocarbon degradation. The thermal history of a reservo...

Many world class large carbonate reservoirs leave behind at least half of the initial oil in place. Typically water injection is used to improve oil recovery while gas injection is used to maintain pressure or to promote oil gravity drainage. Immiscible gas injection, including injection of CO2, has been considered but not implemented on a large scale for economic reasons. Furthermore, interest...

Microbial populations associated with microbial enhanced oil recovery (MEOR) and their abundance in the Xinjiang Luliang water-flooding petroleum reservoir were investigated using 16S rRNA, nitrate reductases, dissimilatory sulfate reductase, and methyl coenzyme-M reductase-encoded genes to provide ecological information for the potential application of MEOR. 16S rRNA gene miseq sequencing reve...

One of the tertiary methods for enhanced oil recovery (EOR) is the injection of chemicals into oil reservoirs, and surface active agents (surfactants) are among the most used chemicals. Surfactants lead to increased oil production by decreasing interfacial tension (IFT) between oil and the injected water and to the wettability alteration of the oil reservoir rock. Since surfactants are predomin...