Preparo de arenitos sintéticos e estudo de suas propriedades para uso na recuperação avançada de petróleo

Abstract

The natural rocks used for studying enhanced oil recovery (EOR) are expensive to acquire and are also anisotropic. Moreover, any detailed study on enhanced recovery requires several tests. For those reasons, this work consisted on obtaining synthetic sandstones composed of beach sand and ceramic shale, both with properties similar to those found in natural rocks. In order to do so, variations were performed on shale concentration (from 20 to 40% in weight), on compaction pressure (from 100 to 200 kgf/cm2) and on syntherization temperature (from 850 to 950 ºC), and a 2³ factorial design with centerpoint triple replicates was done, using the Statistica 8.0 software. Experiments aiming to analyse the material chemical and mineralogical compositions, the fluids rheology and the conventional oil recovery were also performed. The results showed that increases in compaction pressure and in shale concentration and decreases in temperature lead to decreases in porosity and permeability and to increases in resistance to uniaxial compression. The models generated to theses response variables are meaningful and predictive, describing accurately the data, which presented a good reproducibility. The AS 10 synthetic sandstone was used for the conventional oil recovery experiments mainly for having the greatest resistance to uniaxial compression and for displaying permeability similar to the Berea sandstone, which is the most used in enhanced recovery worldwide. The conventional oil recovery experiments using the AS 10 showed the inverse relationship between oil viscosity and recovery factor. Furthermore, the conventional recovery factors found were similar to those from natural sandstone performed with oil having a similar viscosity.