Secondary and Tertiary Oil Recovery Processes

Secondary and Tertiary Oil Recovery Processes

Crude oil

Recovery

Enhanced recovery

Petroleum reservoir engineering

Porous materials

Petroleum reservoirs

Rocks

Floods

Oil well flooding

Reservoirs (water)

Secondary recovery

Capillarity

The demand for crude oil is continuously increasing every year, and the discovery of new oil reservoirs is declining. Crude oil recovery from the mature and developed fields is somewhere between 20 and 40% of the original oil in place. Therefore, it is necessary to boost the production from the existing mature fields. Secondary recovery of hydrocarbon involves techniques that compensate the natural energy of the reservoir by injecting fluids, usually water or gas. Tertiary recovery methods are implemented to recover the crude oil trapped within the capillaries of the reservoir rocks. Tertiary recovery is the process in which different combinations of chemicals or thermal energy, or microbes are infused into the reservoir, which alters the reservoir rock and fluid properties, relative permeability, capillary pressure within the porous medium, interfacial tension, and wettability to recover crude oil and helps in additional crude oil recovery. The mechanism involved in the process and the selection of secondary and tertiary oil recovery methods are discussed in this chapter with a brief introduction of core flooding experiments and reservoir simulators. 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

23-50

2022

Kalita, Puja

Sharma, Vikas

Pandey, Lalit

Tiwari, Pankaj

bookSection

18653529