Tertiary EOR-like microfluidic experiments: influence of viscosity ratio on oil clusters mobilization

TL;DR

This study uses microfluidic experiments to analyze how viscosity ratio influences oil cluster mobilization during enhanced oil recovery, revealing that higher viscosity reduces oil saturation by breaking ganglia into smaller, more mobile entities.

Contribution

It introduces pore-scale microfluidic experiments to investigate the impact of viscosity ratio on oil cluster mobilization, providing new insights into EOR mechanisms.

Findings

Higher viscosity decreases total ganglia volume

Ganglia break into smaller droplets and blobs

Oil transport time exceeds ganglia breakage time

Abstract

Understanding the pore-scale dynamics of immiscible two-phase flow in porous media is crucial 9 for optimizing EOR strategies. In this work, we investigate the mobilization dynamics of oil clusters by 10 means of microfluidic devices that allow pore scale direct characterization of flow in water-wet chips. We varied both flow rates during waterflooding and the viscosity ratio by injecting Glycerol/water mixtures of various compositions right after the waterflooding period. During waterflooding, the flow rate has only a limited impact on residual oil. With a subsequent injection of a Glycerol/water mixture, the oil recovery is significantly enhanced. To better understand the recovery mechanisms, oil clusters were categorized into droplets, blobs and ganglia. Increasing the viscosity of the injected mixture resulted in only a slight reduction in the number of ganglia but significantly decreased their total volume, thus reducing overall oil saturation. This is due to ganglia breakup into smaller ganglia, blobs and droplets that are subsequently mobilized and transported away, while remaining parts of original ganglia still remain trapped. As long as droplets and blobs are considered, their number is seen to only weakly change by the increase of mixture viscosity and even their number may temporarily increase as they result from ganglia rupture. So, the process can be separated in two main steps: ganglia breakage that feed the medium in blobs and droplets and a second step where such moving oil entities are transported. The characteristic time for oil transport is believed to be longer than that required for ganglia breakage.