Page 93 - Formation Damage during Improved Oil Recovery Fundamentals and Applications

Formation Damage by Fines Migration: Mathematical and Laboratory Modeling, Field Cases 75

wave is compensated by the increase of the spreading area (Zeinijahromi
et al., 2012a; 2012b). All stages of inflow well performance with fines lift-
ing, migration, and straining are described by the exact solution for
nonsteady-state transient flow (Marquez et al., 2014).
Exact solutions for fines-migration during high-rate water injection
show steep well skin growth at the beginning of injection, and its rela-
tively fast stabilization during pressure-wave spreading and pressure gradi-
ent decrease (Bedrikovetsky and Caruso, 2014). Here, the fines are lifted
by the drag force during high-velocity flow. Lifting of fines due to low-
salinity water injection and weakening of electrostatic force is described
by the analytical model derived by Yang and Bedrikovetsky (2017).
Rosenbrand et al. (2015) applied the notion of a maximum retention
function for fines detachment in geothermal reservoirs. Yuan and Shapiro
(2011) and Zeinijahromi et al. (2013) applied it for 3D modeling of fines-
assisted low-salinity waterflooding. Guo et al. (2015), Huang et al.
(2017), and Zhu et al. (2017) applied it for coal beds.
Yuan et al. (2016) and Yuan and Moghanloo (2017) applied the modi-
fied model with the maximum retention function for fines fixing by
nanoparticles, both for the problems of well productivity and injectivity.
The authors derived exact solutions for different regimes of injection and
production (Yuan et al., 2018a), accounting for preflush and simultaneous
injection, corresponding to laboratory tests and field exploitation (Yuan
et al., 2018b).
Mobilized particles in porous media are commonly considered to be
transported in suspension in the carrier fluid. This would imply that the
advective velocity of the suspended particles would be equal to that of
the carrier fluid. Thus, the stabilization of permeability, which will occur
after the arrival at the outlet of the fines mobilized at the inlet, will occur
after the injection of one pore volume. Several authors have presented a
contrary theory, where particles may exhibit near-surface motion, where
their velocity is significantly smaller than that of the carrier fluid
(Bradford et al., 2011; Yuan and Shapiro, 2010). Calculations of particle
movement near the pore wall using the Navier-Stokes equations confirm
that these particles will travel with a significantly reduced speed. (Sefrioui
et al., 2013). Despite these results, most mathematical formulations of
fines migration assume an equality of particle and water velocities
(Bradford and Torkzaban, 2008).
Laboratory studies of fines transport in cores show that mobilized fines
role or slide 100 1000 times slower than the injected water velocity