ERPE 362 Enhanced Oil Recovery
This course provides an integrated workflow for field development and production life-cycle, including secondary recovery evaluation, reservoir screening for tertiary recovery, and assessing various EOR schemes. We discuss, in detail, the concept of miscible gas flooding (CO2-EOR), chemical EOR, and thermal recovery. We cover the fundamentals of EOR-related flow mechanisms such as, trapping mechanisms, sweep and displacement efficiency, mobility ratio, interfacial tension, capillary number, miscible gas thermodynamics (vaporization, condensation, swelling), cross-phase diffusion, phase behavior of microemulsions, non-Newtonian flow behavior of polymers, inaccessible pore-volume, steam flood, and others. We also discuss the limitations of various EOR methods such as CO2 capture, compression, and transportation, optimum switching window, evaluation methods including pilot design, tracers, economic assessment, and decision analysis. Study of field cases and reservoir simulations will also be addressed.