Development of cost-effective surfactant flooding technology. Final report

Task 1 of this research was the development of a high-resolution, fully implicit, finite-difference, multiphase, multicomponent, compositional simulator for chemical flooding. The major physical phenomena modeled in this simulator are dispersion, heterogeneous permeability and porosity, adsorption, interfacial tension, relative permeability and capillary desaturation, compositional phase viscosity, compositional phase density and gravity effects, capillary pressure, and aqueous-oleic-microemulsion phase behavior. Polymer and its non-Newtonian rheology properties include shear-thinning viscosity, permeability reduction, inaccessible pore volume, and adsorption. Options of constant or variable space grids and time steps, constant-pressure or constant-rate well conditions, horizontal and vertical wells, and multiple slug injections are also available in the simulator. The solution scheme used in this simulator is fully implicit. The pressure equation and the mass-conservation equations are solved simultaneously for the aqueous-phase pressure and the total concentrations of each component. A third-order-in-space, second-order-in-time finite-difference method and a new total-variation-diminishing (TVD) third-order flux limiter are used that greatly reduce numerical dispersion effects. Task 2 was the optimization of surfactant flooding. The code UTCHEM was used to simulate surfactant polymer flooding