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Dynamic Screening for Microbial Enhanced Oil Recovery (MEOR)
- Publisher: European Association of Geoscientists & Engineers
- Source: Conference Proceedings, IOR 2017 - 19th European Symposium on Improved Oil Recovery, Apr 2017, Volume 2017, p.1 - 14
Abstract
Microbial Enhanced Oil Recovery (MEOR) is a cost-effective and environmentally friendly method for mature reservoirs, exploiting indigenous microorganisms that can be stimulated in the reservoir. As MEOR relies of the combination of various mechanisms a very well designed screening procedure is necessary for a successful field application.
In a MEOR project started 2011 by Wintershall and BASF, we established dynamic sandpacks to investigate microorganisms sampled from Wintershall fields. Requirement for the setups are strictly anaerobic and sterile conditions. Original fluids including oil, injection water and reservoir microbes are used together with different materials to create the porous media consisting of either glass beads, quartz sand or crushed reservoir rock in order to produce sandpacks with permeabilities ranging from 1 to 13 D. Analytics included petrophysical aspects(permeability, pososity, fluid saturations) as well as microbial methods (e.g. 16S sequencing). In more than 20 dynamic MEOR experiments we observed that the choice of the porous medium is crucial for dynamic screenings and affects both microbial growth as well as oil recovery. Our study contributes to the improvement of MEOR screening methods by conducting reliable dynamic experiments, which will help having more accurate predictions for MEOR field applications in the future.