A Rice University laboratory has provided proof that foam may be the right stuff to maximize enhanced oil recovery (EOR). In tests, foam pumped into an experimental rig that mimicked the flow paths deep underground proved better at removing oil from formations with low permeability than common techniques involving water, gas, surfactants or combinations of the three. The open-access paper led by Rice scientists Sibani Lisa Biswal and George Hirasaki was published online today by the Royal Society of Chemistry journal Lab on a Chip. Oil rarely sits in a pool underground waiting to be pumped out to energy-hungry surface dwellers. Often, it lives in formations of rock and sand and hides in small cracks and crevices that have proved devilishly difficult to tap. Drillers pump various substances downhole to loosen and either push or carry oil to the surface. Biswal’s lab has learned a great deal about how foam forms. Now, with an eye toward EOR, she and her colleagues created microfluidic models of formations — they look something like children’s ant farms — to see how well foam stacks up against other materials in removing as much oil as possible. Foam sent through a microfluidic model created at Rice University
The post Foam favorable for oil extraction: Experiments visualize methods for enhanced recovery from wells has been published on Technology Org.
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