Natural gas, which accounts for a quarter of worlds energy, has been a major energy source because of its abundance and less impact on environment. With explorations at higher depth, pressure and temperature, the share of gas condensate reservoirs to global gas production is increasing. A unique production challenge associated with these reservoirs is the condensate blockage problem, which is the buildup of condensate liquid saturation around wellbore as a result of drawdown below dew point pressure. Mitigation of this problem requires in depth understanding of the multiphase flow of liquid and gas. Surfactants are well known in the literature for affecting such multiphase flow characteristics in reservoirs. They affect the flow behavior primarily by wettability alteration as well as spreading coefficient modification. In this study, multiphase flow characteristics of gas condensates, with and without surfactants were observed by running corefloods representing actual reservoir retrograde condensation phenomena. A commercial anionic surfactant, Alfoterra® 123-4S, was successfully shown to facilitate condensate removal with relative permeability enhancement of over 17 percent at a surfactant concentration of 2000 ppm, which was also the optimum concentration under the flowing conditions. The efficacy of surfactant was observed to be a non-linear function of its concentration and this is attributed mainly to the pleateauing effect above the critical micellar concentration (CMC) values.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LSU/oai:etd.lsu.edu:etd-11112010-214621 |
| Date | 16 November 2010 |
| Creators | Saikia, Bikash Deep. |
| Contributors | Radonjic, Mileva, Sears, Stephen O., Rao, Dandina N. |
| Publisher | LSU |
| Source Sets | Louisiana State University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-11112010-214621/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached herein a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to LSU or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below and in appropriate University policies, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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