Modeling the microbial enhanced oil recovery. From 1D to 3D simulations
Abstract
Microbial enhanced oil recovery (MEOR) is a technique based on the stimulation of growth of the microorganisms within the oil reservoir. These microorganisms can be indigenous or injected with the water. Two main mechanisms to enhance oil recovery are reduction of oil-water interfacial tension by the metabolites which act as the biosurfactants and the selective plugging of highly permeable zones with growing biomass.
To model the influence of the mentioned processes on the oil recovery process the 1D simulator was developed by S.Nielsen and I.Nesterov. The model using the set of the processes including bacterial growth, metabolite production, filtration of bacteria by the porous media and sporulation was applied to different scenarios of bacteria and substrate injection.
The simulation results provided the information important for the implementation of the MEOR technique. Meanwhile some questions cannot be answered without the 3D simulations. So the ongoing development of the 3D MEOR model using the framework of the Black Oil System Simulator (BOSS) with the implicit by pressure and explicit by saturation (IMPES) scheme will be discussed.