January 21, 2004 Technical Dinner Meeting

Practical Aspects of Wettability in Oil Recovery Processes / What I Need to Know & How Can I Use it to Improve Productivity.
 ¤ Eddy Isaacs, Distinguished Lecturer Series – CIM National Body

Biography:

 Eddy Isaacs is the Managing Director of the Alberta Energy Research Institute (AERI). Previously, Eddy served for more than 20 years with the Alberta Research Council (ARC) where he was responsible for ARC's programs in heavy oil and oil sands.

 Eddy holds a Ph.D. from the University of Alberta and a B.Sc. from McGill University and has served for several years as an adjunct professor in the Department of Chemical and Material Engineering, University of Alberta. He has over 50 publications and 4 patents in the energy field.

 Eddy currently serves on the Boards of the Petroleum Technology Alliance of Canada (PTAC), Canadian Oil Sands Network for Research and Development (CONRAD), the IEA Weyburn Monitoring Project and is the co-chair of the Technology Working Group of the National Air Issues Coordinating Committee on Climate Change (NAICC-CC).

 AERI was formed on August 1, 2000. It has an expanded mandate from that of its predecessor the Alberta Oil Sands Technology and Research Authority (AOSTRA). AERI promotes energy research and technology evaluation and transfer in areas that include conventional and unconventional oil and gas, coal, carbon management, improving energy efficiency and renewable energy as part of a cleaner energy strategy for Alberta.

Abstract:

 The importance of reservoir wettability and how it affects productivity and ultimate recovery has been a long-standing problem in the oil and gas industry. Even after many years of investigation the benefits or hindrance to performance of the wetting tendencies of reservoir fluids or changes in wettability due to fluid rock interactions, is still a controversial subject. Because of the lack of understanding of the reservoir phenomena associated with wetting, reservoir engineers have, for the most part, not taken advantage of this and other interfacial phenomena to increase the rate and extent of reservoir recovery.  In addition, numerical models that are widely used by the petroleum industry to forecast productivity have largely neglected to include the associated physical mechanisms. This has resulted in models that are strong at matching but are weak at predicting reservoir behaviour.

 In contrast to the above, for the extraction of bitumen from oil sands, it has long been demonstrated that the wetting tendency of the sand grains is crucial to the economics of extraction. It is well established, for example, that changes in the water chemistry (especially the presence of divalent ions) can alter dramatically the extraction efficiency.

 The question that arises …are there practical understandings of wettability that can be used to take advantage of this phenomena in oil recovery?

 This presentation describes the key interaction parameters between reservoir fluids and the porous matrix and practical methods for measuring the wetting tendencies. We show how to use the electric properties of the rock/water and oil/water interfaces as a predictive tool in characterizing wetting behaviour. A framework is then provided for relating productivity to wetting tendencies during the mobilization, movement, flow and production of fluids in porous reservoirs.  Finally, we illustrate how these concepts can be used to improve productivity in waterflooding, enhanced recovery and thermal operations.