Regular Article
Experimental study of microbial enhanced oil recovery in oil-wet fractured porous media
Department of Chemical Engineering, Isfahan University of Technology, Isfahan 84156-83111, Iran
* Corresponding author: arkhazali@cc.iut.ac.ir
Received:
9
May
2019
Accepted:
1
September
2020
Without Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) operations, the final recovery factor of most hydrocarbon reservoirs would be limited. However, EOR can be an expensive task, especially for methods involving gas injection. On the other hand, aqueous injection in fractured reservoirs with small oil-wet or mixed-wet matrices will not be beneficial if the rock wettability is not changed effectively. In the current research, an unpracticed fabrication method was implemented to build natively oil-wet, fractured micromodels. Then, the efficiency of microbial flooding in the micromodels, as a low-cost EOR method, is investigated using a new-found bacteria, Bacillus persicus. Bacillus persicus improves the sweep efficiency via reduction of water/oil IFT and oil viscosity, in-situ gas production, and wettability alteration mechanisms. In our experiments, the microbial flooding technique extracted 65% of matrix oil, while no oil was produced from the matrix system by water or surfactant flooding.
© A. Abolhasanzadeh et al., published by IFP Energies nouvelles, 2020
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.