Experimental investigation on mobility reduction factor of surfactant-alternating-gas foam flooding

Foam flooding is one of the common Enhance Oil Recovery (EOR) methods to mitigate the drawbacks of gas injection process. Whereas Surfactant-Alternating-Gas SAG is a common technique in the real cases, all developed foam flow models have been developed based on pre-generated foam flooding. This study aims to investigate the effect of different existing parameters in the current foam models on SAG foam process. A set of core flooding experiments were designed to meet the mentioned objective. These experiments considered the effect of several parameters on the mobility reduction factor (MRF) including: surfactant types, flow rate, surfactant concentration, and salinity. A high core permeable core was considered as the porous medium, three different anionic surfactants (AOS, IOS and MFOAMX) were employed as the foaming agents, and the nitrogen gas was utilized as injected gas. Pressure drop throughout the flooding was monitored and MRF was calculated for each experiment. The results were interpreted using the ANOVA method to find out the most effective parameter in SAG foam process. The results revealed that the surfactant concentration plays the main role in MRF, however, salinity effect is not significant. Besides that, changing water saturation during the flooding, leaded to significant changes in MRF.