Microbial Enhanced Oil Recovery (MEOR) is potentially useful to increment oil recovery from a reservoir beyond primary and secondary recovery operations using microorganisms and their metabolites. Stimulation of bacterial growth for biosurfactant production and degradation of heavy oil fractions by indigenous microorganisms can enhance the fluidity and reduce the capillary forces that retain th...

In oil industry, recovery of crude oil can be improved by injecting aqueous solutions containing surfactants, polymers, and mineral ions into an oil reservoir. This process is called enhanced oil recovery. Water and oil are immiscible, separated by an interface, and their motion through a capillary tube is governed by the surface tension. However, the physics can be more complex during an enhan...

One of the mostly used enhanced oil recovery methods is the injection of water or gas under pressure to maintain or reverse the declining pressure in a reservoir. Several parameters should be optimized in a fluid injection process. The usual optimizing methods evaluate several scenarios to find the best solution. Since it is required to run the reservoir simulator hundreds of times, the process...

The community diversities of two oil reservoirs with low permeability of 1.81 × 10(-3) and 2.29 × 10(-3) μm(2) in Changqing, China, were investigated using a high throughput sequencing technique to analyze the influence of biostimulation with a nutrient activator on the bacterial communities. These two blocks differed significantly in salinity (average 17,500 vs 40,900 mg/L). A core simulation ...

Block heights and capillary continuity between matrix blocks play paramount role in the sensitivity analysis and therefore the history matching of cumulative oil production and production rate of carbonated fractured reservoirs. In this study, the influence of these parameters upon cumulative production and recovery factor of an Iranian fractured reservoir were studied by the usage of a sim...

The processes of nucleation, bubble growth and finally the creation of connected gas during the pressure draw-down in an oil reservoir are discussed. From these mechanisms, possible descriptions of foamy oil production appear. One of these mechanisms is the creation of bubbles, small compared to pore sizes, which move with the oil phase and which push the oil out of the reservoir. If this mecha...

A reservoir type transdermal patch for delivery of ketorolac, a potent analgesic agent was studied. The low permeability of skin is the rate-limiting step for delivery of most of the drugs. Studies were carried out to investigate the effect of permeation enhancers on the in vitro permeation of ketorolac across rat skin. The reservoir type transdermal patch was fabricated and the core was filled...

This study used an exogenous lipopeptide-producing Bacillus subtilis to strengthen the indigenous microbial enhanced oil recovery (IMEOR) process in a water-flooded reservoir in the laboratory. The microbial processes and driving mechanisms were investigated in terms of the changes in oil properties and the interplay between the exogenous B. subtilis and indigenous microbial populations. The ex...

Water injection is an enhanced oil recovery method which is applied for number of reservoirs especially in the offshore fields around the world. Sea-water injection process is usually associated with important concerns affecting the efficiency, safety, and economy of the operation like formation damage, mineral scaling, early breakthrough and corrosion. Incompatibility between injected and ...

For the characteristics of horizontal fractures in shallow low-permeability oil layers after hydraulic fracturing in multilayer reservoirs, horizontal fractures are taken equivalent to an elliptical cylinder with the reservoir thickness using the equivalent permeability model; then, upon the elliptic seepage theory, the seepage field which has led by a vertical well with horizontal fractures is...