Modeling of oil reservoirs with focus on microbial induced effects

Abstract

As an abstract to this thesis, we review some literatures in EOR and discussed the processes, strength and weakness of Microbial Enhanced Oil Recovery techniques. A two phase flow model comprising water and oil via the concept of mean pressure has been formulated using mass conservation equations, Darcy's law and constitutive relations. This resulted in a set of coupled nonlinear parabolic partial differential equation with primary variables being the mean pressure and water saturation. We discretized these equations in one dimension using a control volume discretization scheme in space and implicit Euler in time. We employed the IMPES approach which decoupled the primary variables. A model validation test was made by comparison with an analytical solution and with the Couplex-Gas benchmark. The model was used to investigate two major mechanisms by which the activities of bacterial helps in enhancing the recovery of the residual oil.