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A special issue of Energies (ISSN 1996-1073). This special issue belongs to the section "H: Geo-Energy".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (3 August 2023) | Viewed by 5299

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Special Issue Editors

Dr. Zhaojie Song

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Guest Editor

State Key Laboratory of Petroleum Resources and Prospecting and Unconventional Petroleum Research Institute, China University of Petroleum, Beijing 102249, China
Interests: unconventional hydrocarbon phase behavior and enhanced oil recovery; CO2 flooding and geological storage (CCUS); multi-phase flow through porous media

Prof. Dr. Shengnan Chen

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Guest Editor

Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada
Interests: tight/shale reservoir development; enhanced oil recovery; machine learning and data analytics; reservoir performance optimization

Dr. Hu Jia

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Guest Editor

State Key Laboratory of Oil and Gas Reservoir Geology and Exploitation, Southwest Petroleum University, Chengdu 610500, China
Interests: enhanced hydrocarbon recovery; stimulation agent for oil and gas wells

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to invite you to submit papers to the journal Energies for a Special Issue that will be entirely devoted to “New Insights into Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) for Unconventional Reservoirs”. The Special Issue will expand on essential technical challenges for improving the oil recovery of unconventional reservoirs. This Special Issue continues to be the best opportunity you'll have to exchange information, formulate strategic ideas, and solve problems to manage and optimize your unconventional resource plays.

Unconventional reservoirs are a strategic resource that can alleviate the contradiction between energy supply and demand. The development of unconventional reservoirs by horizontal wells and stimulated reservoir volume fracturing has achieved some success, but the low oil recovery is still an unavoidable problem. This issue will seek to ignite contrasting perspectives toward an effective recovery enhancement approach for unconventional reservoirs.

Potential topics of interest include but are not limited to:

CO₂ storage and enhanced oil recovery in unconventionals;
Novel methods for enhanced oil recovery in unconventionals;
Theoretical and experimental investigation on the liquid transport in porous media;
Phase behavior of multicomponent fluids in unconventionals;
Rock–fluid and fluid–fluid interactions PVT data analysis;
Production performance evaluation;
Case studies in IOR/EOR field pilots.

Dr. Zhaojie Song
Dr. Shengnan Chen
Dr. Hu Jia
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Energies is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

reservoir production and recovery mechanisms
flow and phase behavior in shale/tight reservoirs
CO2-enhanced oil recovery and carbon sequestration
surfactants and nanofluids for EOR
machine learning

Published Papers (4 papers)

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Research

21 pages, 5912 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Characterization and Dynamic Adjustment of the Flow Field during the Late Stage of Waterflooding in Strongly Heterogeneous Reservoirs

by Daigang Wang, Fangzhou Liu, Guoyong Li, Shumei He, Kaoping Song and Jing Zhang

Energies 2023, 16(2), 831; https://doi.org/10.3390/en16020831 - 11 Jan 2023

Cited by 2 | Viewed by 1339

Abstract

The flow field is the fluid dynamic flow path in strongly heterogeneous reservoirs, and its evolution significantly affects the distribution of remaining oil, showing a disordered and highly dispersed mode caused by long-time water injection. By combining traditional flow-field evaluation with flow diagnostics, this paper proposes a methodology to quantitatively characterize and adjust the flow field in real time during the late stage of waterflooding in strongly heterogeneous reservoirs. In the study, the fluid velocity, abundance of predominant remaining oil, and Lorenz coefficient are preferred as the characteristic parameters to evaluate the effect of reservoir and flow heterogeneity on the flow field. Taking the minimization of the Lorentz coefficient as the objective function, the optimal injection and production parameters are obtained by dynamic adjusting the flow field. The results show that as water injection continues, the shape and variation of the flow field are jointly influenced by the reservoir rhythm, vertical permeability contrast, and lateral permeability distribution. The larger the permeability contrast, the greater the influence of the lateral permeability distribution. When the permeability contrast is large, the Lorenz coefficient strongly depends on the lateral permeability distribution. Finally, this method is applied to an actual heterogeneous reservoir, and a better effect of oil increase and water reduction is achieved. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue New Insights into Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) for Unconventional Reservoirs)

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13 pages, 3045 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Experimental Investigation on the Imbibition Behavior of Nanofluids in the Tight Oil and Gas Reservoir through the Application of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Method

by Hui Li, Can Wang, Ben Li, Xixia Wen, Jianchuan Li and Lu Tian

Energies 2023, 16(1), 454; https://doi.org/10.3390/en16010454 - 31 Dec 2022

Cited by 5 | Viewed by 1075

Abstract

Tight oil and gas resources are widely distributed and play an important role in the petroleum industry. Due to its nanoscale pore-throat characteristics, the capillary effect is remarkable, and spontaneous imbibition is very beneficial to the development of low-permeability reservoirs. In this study, the imbibition experiments of 2D nano blackcard, nanoemulsion, and water were carried out, respectively. The pore-throat fluid distribution characteristics before and after core imbibition were analyzed with nuclear magnetic resonance technology, and the enhanced oil recovery effects of 2D nano blackcard nanoemulsion, and water were comprehensively evaluated. The results show that the final recovery factors of cores soaked in 2D nano blackcard (0.005 ωt%) and nanoemulsion (0.02 ωt%) or imbibed in water are 32.29%, 26.05%, and 7.19%, respectively. It can be found that 2D nano blackcard is the fluid with the best imbibition effect. In this work, a new type of 2D nano blackcard was proposed and identified as a functional imbibition fluid for enhanced oil recovery in tight reservoirs, providing a practical reference for the effective development of tight, low-permeability oil and gas reservoirs. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue New Insights into Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) for Unconventional Reservoirs)

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12 pages, 4019 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Experimental Study on Conformance Control Using Acidic Nanoparticles in a Heterogeneous Reservoir by Flue Gas Flooding

by Zemin Ji, Qun Zhang, Yang Gao, Jing Wang, Chang He, Lu Han and Wenjing Zhao

Energies 2023, 16(1), 315; https://doi.org/10.3390/en16010315 - 27 Dec 2022

Viewed by 1000

Abstract

Flue gas flooding has been applied in many oilfields for its accessibility and low cost. However, the problem of gas channeling during flue gas flooding is significantly more serious due to reservoir heterogeneity and gravity override, and the traditional profile control agent is inapplicable because of flue gas acidity. In order to solve this challenge, a novel acidic nanoparticle was presented first; then, the profile control performance of both water slugs and this novel nanoparticle for flue gas flooding in heterogeneous reservoirs was studied using core samples with different rhythms. The results show that the stability of the acidic nanoparticles is good, and the viscosity of the nanoparticle solution increases as the pH decreases, which is suitable for acidic flue gas flooding. The oil recovery of flue gas flooding in a positive rhythm core is 5–10% greater than that in a reverse rhythm core. The water slug can improve oil recovery by 5% in the reverse rhythm core, and oil recovery was less than 2% in the positive rhythm core. The effect of a nanoparticle slug is much better than the water slug. It improved the oil recovery by 10% in the positive rhythm core by continuing flue gas flooding after nanoparticle slug treatment, which was more than the 20% in the reverse rhythm core. The ultimate oil recovery of both positive and reverse-rhythm cores by acidic nanoparticle slug treatment was around 50%, which was 10% greater than the water slug treatment. The conformance control using acidic nanoparticles is more suitable for reverse rhythm formation due to its plugging capacity, deformation characteristic, and viscosity increment in an acidic environment. This research demonstrated that these novel acidic nanoparticles could be effectively applied to conformance control during flue gas flooding in heterogeneous reservoirs. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue New Insights into Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) for Unconventional Reservoirs)

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14 pages, 2728 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Investigation of Stress Sensitivity of Shale Nanopores via a Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Method

by Mingjun Chen, Zhehan Lai, Yili Kang, Sidong Fang, Hua Liu, Weihong Wang, Jikun Shen and Zhiqiang Chen

Energies 2023, 16(1), 138; https://doi.org/10.3390/en16010138 - 23 Dec 2022

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 940

Abstract

Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) is widely used to characterize the pore structure of rock. The nanoscale pores and fractures are well developed in a shale gas reservoir. The closure of nanopores caused by the increase in effective stress during the gas production process could induce stress sensitivity in shale nanopores, which has a great impact on the single-well productivity in the middle–late development stage. In this paper, shale samples from the Longmaxi Formation were taken to investigate the nanopore stress sensitivity via an NMR method. Samples with different degrees of pore and fracture development were selected and NMR experiments under different effective stress conditions were carried out. The results show that: (1) As the effective stress increases, the pore space in shale is continuously compressed, and the cumulative pore volume of shale decreases; (2) There is a more pronounced decrease in the cumulative pore volume of samples containing larger pores with the increase in effective stress. However, there are obvious differences in the pore volume changes in different pore sizes; (3) The transformation of nanopores of different sizes occurs in the process of effective stress loading. When the effective stress is small, the pores with diameters larger than 50 nm are mainly transformed to those with diameters of 10–50 nm. When the effective stress increases to a certain extent, the pores with diameters of 10–50 nm are mainly transformed to those with diameters of 0–10 nm; (4) There are significant differences in the compressibility of nanopores of different sizes. Larger nanopores generally have a higher compression coefficient and a stronger stress sensitivity. In the process of effective stress loading, the compression coefficient of pores with diameters between 10 and 50 nm changes relatively slowly, which can well-maintain the pore shape and quantity. Based on the variation in porosity ratio with effective stress, a new method of dividing shale nanopores is proposed; those with diameters smaller than 10 nm, those with diameters of 10–50 nm, and those with diameters larger than 50 nm. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue New Insights into Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) for Unconventional Reservoirs)

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