AndreaBozzo/ceres-open-data-index huggingface dataset:
OIL PRODUCTION ENHANCEMENT THROUGH A STANDARDIZED BRINE TREATMENT

In order to permit the environmentally safe discharge of brines produced from oil wells in Pennsylvania to the surface waters of the Commonwealth and to rapidly brings as many wells as possible into compliance with the law, the Pennsylvania Oil and Gas Association (POGAM) approached the Pennsylvania State University to develop a program designed to demonstrate that a treatment process to meet acceptable discharge conditions and effluent limitations can be standardized for all potential stripper wells brine discharge. This project has been underway since 1987. After the initial studies, the first phase of this project was initiated. A bench-scale prototype model was developed for conducting experiments in laboratory conditions. The experiments pursued in the laboratory conditions were focused on the removal of ferrous iron from synthetically made brine. Iron was selected as the primary heavy metals for studying the efficiency of the treatment process. The results of a number of experiments in the lab were indicative of the capability of the proposed brine treatment process in the removal of iron. Concurrent with the laboratory experiments, a comprehensive and extensive kinetic study was initiated. This study was necessary to provide the required data base for process modeling. This study included the investigation of the critical pH as well as the rate and order of reactions of the studied elements: aluminum, lead, zinc, and copper. In the second phase of this project, a field-based prototype was developed to evaluate and demonstrate the treatment process effectiveness. These experiments were conducted under various conditions and included the testing on five brines from different locations with various dissolved constituents: Red Valley brine, Warren brine, Cooper brine, Kine brine, and Bradford brine. Although the field model was constructed for treating brine with the flow rate up to 1 bbl/d, significant results in the reduction of heavy metals were obtained up to 16 bbIld. The process modeling for the treatment process was also performed in this phase by incorporating the laboratory and field works. Due to the low concentration of many heavy metals such as aluminum, copper, lead, and zinc in the tested brine (in the field), no conclusive results were obtained for these elements. However, laboratory studies has indicated promising results in removal of these metals from synthetically made brine. The outcome of this research has been a software package, currently based on iron's reactivity, to be used for design purposes. The developed computer program was refined as far as possible using the results from laboratory and field experiments. The treatment process and software is fine-tuned to ensure their applicability to all brine discharge from stripper wells in the state's oil producing region.

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THE COST OF WETLAND CREATION AND RESTORATION

This report examines the economics of wetland creation, restoration, and enhancement projects, especially as they are used within the context of mitigation for unavoidable wetland losses. Complete engineering-cost accounting profiles of over 90 wetland projects were developed in collaboration with leading wetland restoration and creation practitioners around the country to develop a primary source database. Data on the costs of over 1,000 wetland projects were gathered from published sources and other available databases to develop a secondary source database. Cases in both databases were carefully analyzed and a set of baseline cost per acre estimates were developed for wetland creation, restoration, and enhancement. Observations of costs varied widely, ranging from $5 per acre to $1.5 million per acre. Differences in cost were related to the target wetland type, and to site-specific and project-specific factors that affected the preconstruction, construction, and post-construction tasks necessary to carry out each particular project. Project-specific and site-specific factors had a much larger effect on project costs than wetland type for non-agricultural projects. Costs of wetland creation and restoration were also shown to differ by region, but not by as much as expected, and in response to the regulatory context. The costs of wetland creation, restoration, and enhancement were also analyzed in a broader economic context through examination of the market for wetland mitigation services, and through the development of a framework for estimating compensation ratios-the number of acres of created, restored, or enhanced wetland required to compensate for an acre of lost natural wetland. The combination of per acre creation, restoration, and enhancement costs and the compensation ratio determine the overall mitigation costs associated with alternative mitigation strategies.

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GEOLOGIC, GEOCHEMICAL, AND GEOGRAPHIC CONTROLS ON NORM IN PRODUCED WATER FROM TEXAS OIL, GAS, AND GEOTHERMAL RESERVOIRS

Water from Texas oil, gas, and geothermal wells contains natural radioactivity that ranges from several hundred to several thousand picocuries per liter (pCi/l). This natural radioactivity in produced fluids and the scale that forms in producing and processing equipment can lead to increased concerns for worker safety and additional costs for handling and disposing of water and scale.

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Mercury Emissions and Effects-The Role of Coal

Mercury in its various chemical forms is a difficult element to measure at low concentrations. Reliable data on mercury emissions are therefore sparse. Some data suggest that the concentration of mercury in the atmosphere is increasing, some say that it may be decreasing. Mercury pollution in remote lakes in Scandinavia and North America is reported to be increasing and some fish stocks are becoming contaminated. Mercury emissions from coal utilization are reviewed as well as control options. The speciation of mercury, oxidized or elemental, dictates its emissions and effects. Oxidized mercury is soluble and has a tendency to associate with particles. Emissions of oxidized mercury may be efficiently controlled by some FaD systems. Some activated carbons have the potential to control the oxidized mercury. Any oxidized mercury escaping from the stack is deposited on a local or regional scale. On the other hand, elemental mercury is extremely volatile and insoluble and is not captured by FGD systems. Elemental mercury may be removed by some chemically treated activated carbons or selective sorbents but these are only currently being tested at pilot scale on coal-fired power stations. Elemental mercury travels hundreds of kilometers and contributes to the increasing atmospheric load. Emissions of mercury from coal combustion have not been associated directly with any detrimental environmental effects, More research is required on the development of sampling and analysis systems which can measure the individual mercury species at the concentrations encountered in coal combustion systems and in the environment. A complete evaluation of mercury emissions from coal combustion requires more high quality data on speciation. Current research into sampling and analysis is now starting to produce such data.

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Direct Liquefaction Proof-of-Concept Facility

This report presents the results of work conducted under the DOE Proof of Concept Program in direct coal liquefaction at Hydrocarbon Research, Inc. in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, from October 1992 through April 1994. The work included extensive modifications to HRl's existing 3 ton per day Process Development Unit (PDU) and completion of the first PDU run (PaC Run 1) under the Program. The 58-day pac Run 1 demonstrated scale up of the Catalytic Two-Stage Uquefaction (CTSL Process) on Illinois No.6 coal to produce distillate liquid products at a rate of up to 5 barrels per ton of moisture-ash-free coal. During the first fiscal year, the major effort was to modify the PDU to improve reliability and to provide the flexibility to operate in several alternate modes. The Kerr McGee Rose-SRsM unit from Wilsonville, Alabama, was redesigned and installed next to the U.S. Filter installation to allow a comparison of the two solids removal systems. Also included was a new enclosed reactor tower, upgraded computer controls and a data acquisition system, an alternate power supply, a newly refurbished reactor, an in-line hydrotreater, interstage sampling system, coal handling unit, a new ebullating pump, load cells and improved controls and remodeled preheaters. The 58-day CTSL Illinois coal demonstration run achieved several milestones in the effort to further reduce the cost of liquid fuels from coal. This was the first demonstration of HRl's Catalytic Two Stage Uquefaction technology at the 3 ton per day scale and featured many improvements over the earlier testing conducted at the Wilsonville, Alabama Pilot Plant. Distillate liquid yields of 5 barrels per ton of moisture ash free coal (about 75 work on MAF coal) were achieved. Coal slurry recycle rates were reduced from the 2-2.5 to 1 ratio demonstrated at Wilsonville to as low as 0.9 to 1 during the recent test. This greatly improves the process efficiency, process performance and economics. Coal feed rates were increased during the test by 50% while maintaining process performance at a marginally higher reactor severity. This offers the potential for further reduction of commercial plant investment per unit of coal feed. Sulfur in the coal was reduced from 4 wt% to about 0.02 wt% sulfur in the clean distillate fuel product. More than 3500 gallons of distillate fuels were collected for evaluation and upgrading studies by DOE and their contractors. The ROSE-SRsM Process was operated for the first time with a pentane solvent in a steady-state mode. The energy rejection of the ash concentrate was consistently below prior data, being as low as 12%, allowing improved liquid yields and recovery.

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Natural Fractures and Lineaments of the East-Central Greater Green River Basin

This topical report addresses the relationship of natural fractures and lineaments to hydrocarbon production of the east-central Greater Green River Basin. The tight gas sands of the Cretaceous Mesaverde Formation are the primary focus of this work. IER and USGS researchers have (1) demonstrated that east-northeast and northeast-trending regional fractures and lineaments are important to hydrocarbon production; (2) recognized the east-northeast regional joint set near two horizontal wells (Champlin 254 Amoco B 2-H and Champlin 320 C-1A-H) in the Washakie and Great Divide basins, respectively; (3) related Cretaceous Almond Formation thickness and facies to northeast-trending faults; (4) developed a program to automatically derive lineaments from small linear features; (5) associated oil and gas production data with east-northeast and northeast-trending lineaments and linear features; and (6) digitally compared lineaments with potentiometric maps of the Mesaverde and Frontier formations. The construction of a digital geologic database (geology, satellite images, linear features, lineaments, digital elevation data, township-range, oil and gas fields, gravity, magnetic, production and potentiometric maps) has been an integral part of this effort.

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SCALING OF BUBBLE GROWTH IN A POROUS MEDIUM

Processes involving liquid-to-gas phase change in porous media are routinely encountered, for example in the recovery of oil, geothermal processes, nuclear waste disposal or enhanced heat transfer [2,3, 15, 16]. They involve diffusion (and convection) in the pore space, driven by an imposed supersaturation in pressure or temperature. Phase change proceeds by nucleation and phase growth. Depending on pore surface roughness, a number of nucleation centers exist, thus phase growth occurs from a multitude of clusters [18]. Contrary to growth in the bulk or in a Rele-Shaw cell [8, 13, 14], however, growth patterns in porous media are disordered and not compact. As in immiscible displacements [7, 17], they reflect the underlying pore microstructure. The competition between multiple clusters is also different from the bulk. For example, cluster growth may be controlled by a combination of diffusion (e.g. Laplace equation in the quasi-static case) with percolation. Novel growth patterns are expected from this competition [11]. While multiple cluster growth is important, the simpler problem of single-bubble growth is still not well understood. In this section, we focus on the growth of a single bubble, subject to a fixed far-field supersaturation (e.g. by lowering the pressure in a supersaturated solution or by raising the temperature in a superheated liquid). Our emphasis is on deriving a scaling theory for growth at conditions of quasi-static diffusion, guided by recent experimental observations. Visualization of bubble growth in model porous media was recently conducted [9, 10] using 2-D etched-glass micromodels. Fig. 1 shows a typical CO2 cluster evolving from carbonated water, initially saturated at 50 psi, the pressure of which was subsequently reduced to 14.7 psi. The non-compact nature of the cluster is apparent. The cluster grows in a manner similar to external drainage: gas-liquid interfaces are stable in the converging portion of a pore throat, but rapidly move to occupy an adjacent pore (in an event known as a "rheon"), once the capillary pressure barrier of that throat was exceeded. During the early stages, the growth occurs "one-site-at-a-time", which is a mode of interface advance typical of invasion percolation.

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Research Program on Fractured Petroleum Reservoirs  Immiscible Gas-Oil Flow in Fractured/Layered Porous Media

In some fractured reservoirs, a gas pressure gradient of the order of 0.1 psi/ft may be established in the fractures due to flow. Such a pressure gradient could result in recovery enhancement of the matrix oil. Several tests were conducted to study viscous displacement in fractured porous media. These tests included both gravity drainage with free gas displacement and forced gas displacement. The results show that there is considerable recovery improvement due to viscous displacement.

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APPLICATION OF ADVANCED RESERVOIR CHARACTERIZATION, SIMULATION, AND PRODUCTION, OPTIMIZATION STRATEGIES TO MAXIMIZE RECOVERY IN SLOPE AND BASIN CLASTIC RESERVOIRS, WEST TEXAS (DELAWARE BASIN)

The objective of this project is to demonstrate that detailed reservoir characterization of slope and basin clastic reservoirs in sandstones of the Delaware Mountain Group in the Delaware Basin of West Texas and New Mexico is a cost effective way to recover a higher percentage of the original oil in place through strategic placement of infill wells and geologically based field development.

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PRODUCTIVITY AND INJECTIVITY OF HORIZONTAL WELLS

The objective of this Task is to develop a three-dimensional reservoir simulator based on generalized Voronoi grids which honor horizontal/deviated wells, local flow geometry, faults, major heterogeneities, anisotropy, etc. There are difficult geometrical/logical problems associated with automatic generation and visualization of the gridding geometry in 3D, which forms a significant aspect of this Task. The mathematical formulation for the flow simulation should take into account 'such a complex gridding scheme. Pressure and flow calculations in a wellbore (obtained from a wellbore simulator) will be coupled with similar reservoir variables.

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FLOW AND DISPLACEMENT OF BINGHAM PLASTICS IN POROUS MEDIA

Bingham plastics, which exhibit a finite yield stress at zero shear rate, have been used to model the flow behavior of certain heavy oils at reservoir conditions (Barenblatt et aI., 1990). In such fluids, the onset of flow and displacement occurs only after the applied pressure gradient exceeds a minimum value. Understanding the flow behavior of such fluids has been limited to phenomenological approaches (Barenblatt et aI., 1990, Wu et aI, 1992). In this paper, we present numerical simulations and experimental visualization of flow and immiscible displacement of Bingham plastics in porous media using micromodels. First, we describe a novel pore network simulation approach to determine the onset of flow. The dependence of the critical yield stress on the pore-size distribution is discussed. Visualization experiments of the constant-rate immiscible displacement of Bingham plastics in glass micromodels and Rele-Shaw cells are next  resented. The process is subsequently simulated in a pore network. Experiments are successfully simulated with the pore network model. We discuss the effect of the yield stress and injection rate on the displacement patterns. We also propose a classification of the displacement patterns, similar to that for Newtonian displacement (Lenormand, 1989).

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A POPULATION BALANCE MODEL FOR TRANSIENT AND STEADY-STATE FOAM FLOW IN BOISE SANDSTON

An experimental and mechanistic-modeling study is reported for the transient flow of aqueous foam through 1.3-?m2 (1.3-D) Boise sandstone at backpressures in excess of 5 MPa (700 psi) over a quality range from 0.80 to 0.99. Total superficial velocities range from as little as 0.42 to 2.20 m/day (1.4 ft/day to 7 ft/day). Sequential pressure taps and gamma-ray densitometry measure flow resistance and in-situ liquid saturations, respectively. We garner experimental pressure and saturation profiles in both the transient and steady states. Adoption of a mean-size foam-bubble conservation equation along with the traditional reservoir simulation equations allows mechanistic foam simulation. Since foam mobility depends heavily upon its texture, the bubble population balance is both useful and necessary as the role of foam texture must be incorporated into any model which seeks accurate prediction of flow properties. Our model employs capillary pressure- dependent kinetic expressions for lamellae generation and coalescence and also a term for trapping of lamellae. Additionally, the effects of surfactant chemical transport are included. We find quantitative agreement between experimental and theoretical saturation and pressure profiles in both the transient and steady states.

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Post Waterflood C02 Miscible Flood In Light Oil Fluvial Dominated Deltaic Reservoir

Texaco Exploration and Production Inc. (TEPI) and the U.S.. Department of Energy (DOE) entered into a cost sharing cooperative agreement to conduct an Enhanced oil Recovery demonstration project at Port Neches. The field is located in Orange County near Beaumont, Texas, and shown in Figure 1. The project will demonstrate the effectiveness of the CO2 miscible process in Fluvial Dominated Deltaic reservoirs. It will also evaluate the use of horizontal CO2 injection wells to improve the overall sweep efficiency. A data base of FDD reservoirs for the gulf coast region will be developed by LSU, using a screening model developed by Texaco Research Center in Houston. Finally, the results and the information gained from this project will be disseminated throughout the oil industry via a series of SPE papers and industry open forums.

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STUDY OF HYDROCARBON MISCIBLE SOLVENT SLUG INJECTION PROCESS FOR IMPROVED RECOVERY OF HEAVY OIL FROM SCHRADER BLUFF POOL, MILNE POINT UNIT, ALASKA

Alaska is the second largest oil producing state in the nation and currently contributes nearly 24% of the nations oil production. Alaska currently has nearly 22% of the total United States proven reserves. Alaska's known heavy oil and tar sand deposits are estimated to be between 26 and 44 billion barrels. Over the past decade, the production of oil has provided over 85% of the state of Alaska's revenue. The oil production in Alaska has started to decline in the early 1990's which is attributed to decline in the production from super-giant Prudhoe Bay field. In the 1990, the National Energy Strategy Plan developed by U.S. Department of Energy called for 900,000 barrels/day production of heavy oil in the mid 1990's to meet the national demand. To meet this goal, it is imperative that Alaskan heavy oil fields be brought into production. Schrader Bluff reservoir, located in the Milne Point Unit, which is part of the heavy oil field known as West Sak is estimated to contain 1.5 billion barrels of(14 to 21 degree API) oil-in-place. The field is currently under production by primary depletion. However, the primary recovery was expected to be much less than expected value of 12% due to complex reservoir structure. Hence, waterflood has been implemented earlier than anticipated. The eventual implementation of enhanced oil recovery (EaR) techniques will be vital for the recovery of additional oil from this reservoir.

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FOAM FLOW THROUGH A TRANSPARENT ROUGH-WALLED ROCK FRACTURE

This paper presents an experimental study of nitrogen, water, and aqueous foam flow through a transparent replica of a natural rough-walled rock fracture with a hydraulic aperture of roughly 30 ?m. It is established that single-phase flow of both nitrogen and water is well described by analogy to flow between parallel plates. Inertial effects caused by fracture roughness become important in single-phase flow as the Reynolds number approaches 1. Foam exhibits effective control of gas mobility. Foam flow resistances are approximately 10 to 20 times greater than those of nitrogen over foam qualities spanning from 0.60 to 0.99 indicating effective gas-mobility control.  Because previous studies of foam flow have focused mainly upon unfractured porous media, little information is available about foam flow mechanisms in fractured media. The transparency of the fracture allowed flow visualization and demonstrated that foam rheology in fractured media depends upon bubble shape and size. Changes in flow behavior are directly tied to transitions in bubble morphology.

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SCALE-UP OF MISCIBLE FLOOD PROCESSES FOR HETEROGENEOUS ?RESERVOIRS

The current project is a systemic research effort aimed at quantifying relationships between process mechanisms that can lead to improved recovery from gas injection processes performed in heterogeneous Class 1 and Class 2 reservoirs.  It will provide a rational basis for the design of displacement processes that take advantage of crossflow due to capillary, gravity and viscous forces to offset partially the adverse effects of heterogeneity.

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VISUALIZATION AND SIMULATION OF IMMISCIBLE DISPLACEMENT IN FRACTURED SYSTEMS USING MICROMODELS: IMBIBITION

A study of imbibition processes in micromodel geometries that mimic a matrix-fracture system was undertaken. Experiments in glass micromodels and pore network simulation were conducted. It was observed that, at low capillary number values the wetting fluid preferentially invaded the matrix. Two critical capillary numbers were identified, one for the start of penetration in the fracture when the viscosity ratio was much less than one, and another for which the rate of propagation of the front in the fracture is the same with that in the matrix, when the viscosity ratio was greater than one. These critical capillary numbers were well matched with the results of a pore network simulation. We also developed a simplified theory for both critical numbers. Free imbibition in fractured system was investigated and compared favorably with pore network simulation. This process first involves the rapid invasion of the matrix, followed by the subsequent penetration of the fracture.

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