A Non-standard Model for Microbial Enhanced Oil Recovery Including the Oil-water Interfacial Area

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel non-standard model for microbial enhanced oil recovery that incorporates the oil-water interfacial area, eliminating hysteresis and improving prediction accuracy for oil recovery processes.

Contribution

The work presents a new model including interfacial area effects, with an efficient numerical scheme, enabling better simulation and understanding of MEOR mechanisms.

Findings

Inclusion of interfacial area affects oil recovery predictions.

The model captures spatial and temporal evolution of key parameters.

Different interfacial tension parameterizations influence residual oil saturation.

Abstract

In this work we present a non-standard model for microbial enhanced oil recovery including the oil-water interfacial area. Including the interfacial area in the model, we eliminate the hysteresis in the capillary pressure relationship. One of the characteristics that a surfactant should have, it is biological production at the oil-water interface. Therefore, we consider the production rate of surfactants not only as a function of the nutrient concentration, but also the interfacial area. To solve the model equations, we use an efficient and robust linearization scheme that considers a linear approximation of the capillary pressure gradient. A comprehensive, 1D implementation based on two-point flux approximation of the model is achieved. We consider different parameterizations for the interfacial tension and residual oil saturation reduction. Illustrative numerical simulations are presented, where we study the spatial distribution and evolution in time of the average pressure, water saturation, interfacial area, capillary pressure, residual oil saturation and bacterial, nutrient and surfactant concentrations. Inclusion of the interfacial area in the model leads to different predictions of oil recovery. The model can also be used to design new experiments contributing to a better understanding and optimization of MEOR.