Significance of Geochemistry in Alkaline/Surfactant/Polymer (ASP) Flooding
Authors: Korrani Aboulghasem Kazemi , Sepehrnoori Kamy , Delshad Mojdeh 
Published: March 2016

Although geochemical reactions are the fundamental basis of the alkaline/surfactant/polymer (ASP) flooding, their importance is commonly overlooked and not fully assessed. Common assumptions made when modeling geochemical reactions in ASP floods include: 1) ideal solution (i.e., using molalities rather than ion activities) for the water and aqueous geochemical species 2) limiting the number of reactions (i.e., oil/alkali and alkali consumptions) rather than including the entire thermodynamically-equilibrated system 3) ignoring the effect of temperature and pressure on reactions 4) local equilibrium ignoring the kinetics. To the best of our knowledge, the significance of these assumptions has never been discussed in the literature. In this paper we investigate the importance of geochemical reactions during alkaline/surfactant/polymer floods using a comprehensive tool in the sense of surfactant/soap phase behavior as well as geochemistry.

We coupled the United States Geological Survey (USGS) state-of-the-art geochemical tool, with 3D flow and transport chemical flooding module of UTCHEM. This geochemical module includes several thermodynamic databases with various geochemical reactions, such as ion speciation by applying several ion-association aqueous models, mineral, solid-solution, surface-complexation, and ion-exchange reaction. It has capabilities of saturation index calculation, reversible and irreversible reactions, kinetic reaction, mixing solutions, inverse modeling and includes impacts of temperature and pressure on reaction constants and solubility products. The chemical flood simulator has a three phase (water, oil, microemulsion) phase behavior package for the mixture of surfactant/soap, oil, and water as a function of surfactant/soap, salinity, temperature, and co-solvent concentration. Hence, the coupled software package provides a comprehensive tool to assess the significance of geochemical assumptions typically imposed in modeling ASP floods. Moreover, this integrated tool enables modeling of variations in mineralogy present in reservoir rocks. We parallelized the geochemistry module of this coupled simulator for large-scale reservoir simulations.

Our simulation results show that the assumption of ideal solution overestimates ASP oil recovery. Assuming only a subset of reactions for a coupled system is not recommended, particularly when a large number of geochemical species is involved, as is the case in realistic applications of ASP. Reservoir pressure has a negligible effect but temperature has a significant impact on geochemical calculations. Although mineral reaction kinetics is largely a function of the temperature and in-situ water composition, some general conclusions can be drawn as follows: to a good approximation, minerals with slow rate kinetic reaction (e.g., quartz) can be excluded when modeling ASP laboratory floods. However, minerals with fast rate kinetic reactions (e.g., calcite) must be included when modeling lab results. On the other hand, in modeling field-scale applications, local equilibrium assumption (LEA) can be applied for fast rate kinetic minerals, whereas kinetics should be used for slow rate kinetic minerals.