Influence of Wettability and Oil Saturation on the Rheological Behavior of CO2-Foams

Summary Foam processes aim to improve the efficiency of gas-based injection methods through gases mobility control. They have been successfully applied in various EOR contexts: CCUS through CO2-EOR, steam injection for heavy oil reservoirs, and also in fractured reservoirs. The success of such processes depends on multiple factors, among which the interactions between the surfactants, the oil and the rock, play a key role. The purpose of this study is to provide initial answers by focusing on the influence of wettability and oil saturation on the behavior of CO2-foam flows. A new coreflooding set-up is designed for ‘mesoscopic’ cores (2cm diameter) in order to conduct foam formulation screening and perform faster foam injection tests at reservoir conditions. This set-up was first validated by repeating experiments performed previously on classical corefloods with 4cm diameter cores. Similar results in terms of mobility reduction were obtained for the same operating conditions with a considerable reduction of test duration. All experiments were performed with Clashach sandstones cores having approximatively 16% porosity and 600mD permeability. Two gas compositions have been studied: (1) a dense supercritical CO2 (density of 638kg/m3 at P=160bar, T=60°C) and (2) a non-dense gas mixture of CO2 and CH4. For each gas composition, four foam injection tests were carried out: two on water-wet rock samples, two others on crude-aged core samples, and for both in the absence and in presence of oil. Anionic surfactant formulations and gas were co-injected with a gas fraction of 0.7. Foam rheology was assessed by measuring foam apparent viscosity through a scan of interstitial velocities. All the tests performed in dense conditions have highlighted the generation of strong foams, which present shear-thinning rheological behavior; the apparent viscosity decreases as a power law of the interstitial velocity. An influence of the wettability is observed on the foam apparent viscosity, which drops off by 30% in altered wettability rock samples. When samples were originally saturated with oil at Swi, the level of apparent viscosity remains globally unchanged but the kinetics of the initial formation of the foam is slower with oil than without. Foam flooding experiments are sometimes carried out simply in the presence of oil without taking into account the influence of wettability, which appears to be as important, if not more, than the oil saturation itself. These results will hopefully provide some guidance for future foam studies and raise awareness on the importance of these parameters.