Enhanced Oil Recovery

From 2017 till 2021 I was involved in the industrial collaboration with Russian petroleum company GazpromNeft. We were doing several projects on Enhanced Oil Recovery methods (EOR). Our special attention was the chemical flooding: the injection of water with dissolved chemical agents (polymer, surfactants etc), which helps to increase the oil production by decreasing the viscosity ratio aspect and increasing the sweep efficiency. We investigated:

  • the influence of the viscous fingering phenomenon for real-field data
  • design of the chemical flooding scheme. In particular, how to calculate the chemical slug sizes in order to prevent the early breakthrough of the slug (see the figure above)
  • semi-analytical construction of the solutions to 1-dimensional models
  • design and interpretation of SWCTT (single-well chemical tracer test)