Desenvolvimento de sistemas microemulsionados retardados para aplicação na estimulação ácida em reservatórios carbonáticos

Abstract

The necessity to make oil wells increasingly efficient, especially in conditions with high production costs, leads to continuous technological development in his area of knowledge. In December 2019, about 67% of Brazil's oil production came from wells in Pre-Salt carbonate rocks reservoirs. Matrix Acidification is a stimulation technique widely used in carbonates to increase its production as a result of the formation of high conductivity channels around the well, called wormholes. Several characteristics interfere in acidizing process as anisotropy, heterogeneity, oil saturation, and effective rock-acid reaction speed, making it complex technique. Microemulsion systems, formed by thermodynamically stable auto-associative structures that present low surface tension, can control mass and therefore interfere in reactive processes. These systems have already been subject of studies. However, this a field of study is still little explored. This work aims to develop acid oil in water microemulsion systems and test their applications in standard carbonate rock. These systems used ALKONAT-L100 as a surfactant, n-butanol as a co-surfactant, xylene as a nonpolar phase and HCl solutions as a polar phase (1.54 w/w%, 8.27 w/w%, and 15 w/w%). The acid microemulsion systems were characterized in ter terms of turbity, pH, drop size, conductivity, surface tension and thermal stability. Different carbonate rocks were tested, and Indiana carbonate, a standard rock in acidification studies, was chosen to represent the carbonate reservoirs in this study. The core samples were characterized in terms of composition, porosity, permeability, and reactivity in acid. In order of evaluate the interaction between the treatment fluids and Indiana carbonate, studies were carried out, such as the influence of the HCl concentration and the type of treatment systems on wettability and surface reactivity behavior. Experimental designs were carried out in different conditions to verify the influence of HCl concentration, temperature, and reaction time on the reaction speed. To study the technical feasibility of using microemulsified systems, tests were performed to produce Pore Volume to Breakthrough (PVBT) curves followed by subsequent dissolution patterns analyses by high resolution microtomography (Micro-CT) and NMR. The results showed that even at high HCl concentrations, microemulsion systems were formed close to the polar phase apex, and they were thermally resistant (at least 100 OC). The treatment systems containing surfactants, especially the microemulsified ones, caused a significant increase on the rock surface wettability to water and reduced the surface reactivity, compared with the ones with no surfactant. The speed of acid-rock of treatment systems that did not contain surfactants is basically limited by the concentration of HCl, regardless of saturation, whereas for systems containing surfactants, the time factor is also significant. The Micro-CT and NMR results showed effective wormholes morphologies when microemulsified systems were used. In this way, the results obtained demonstrate that microemulsified systems have efficiency and good prospects for application in retard acid-rock reaction in the acid stimulation in carbonates rocks.