Numerical Simulation of Chemical Enhanced Oil Recovery Processes

In this paper we develop a new mathematical formulation for chemical compositional reservoir simulation, and provide a comparison of its results on alkaline-surfactant-polymer flooding with those of UTCHEM simulator. Our research has found that the existing chemical compositional model estimates the adsorption effect on the transport of a component reasonably well but it does not satisfy the principle of mass conservation. Since the total mass conservation equation follows from summing the species-conservation equations over all components, the obtained equation violates the principle of total mass conservation as well. With these partial differential equations as governing equations, several simulators have been developed. In this work, we propose an approach to model the change in pore volume due to adsorption that satisfies the mass conservation law, and allows applying a sequential solution approach.