Flow Behavior and Mechanism Insights into Nanoparticle-Surfactant-Stabilized Nitrogen Foam for Enhanced Oil Recovery in the Mature Waterflooding Reservoir

To solve the problem of poor stability and low enhanced oil recovery efficiency of conventional foam, nanoparticle-surfactant-stabilized nitrogen foam was prepared, and the influence of temperature, salinity, oil content, and pressure on foam performance was systematically investigated. Then, the flow behavior of conventional foam and nanoparticle-surfactant-stabilized foam in porous media was studied. Parallel sand pack flooding and visualization microflooding experiments were performed to investigate the enhanced oil recovery ability of nanoparticle-surfactant-stabilized foam from core-scale to pore-scale. Results showed that the nanoparticles can improve foam performance. When the temperature increases from 60 to 100 °C, the foam volume and foam half-life of nanoparticle-surfactant-stabilized foam decrease by 20 and 36%, respectively. The nanoparticle-surfactant-stabilized foam has a good salt resistance. The oil content limit value of the foam performance is 15%. With the increase of pressure, the foaming performance and foam stability are enhanced obviously. Compared with conventional surfactant-stabilized foam, the nanoparticle-surfactant-stabilized foam can have better plugging and expansion of the swept volume capacity. The micromodel flooding results are consistent with the parallel sand pack flooding results. Compared with conventional surfactant stabilized foam, nanoparticle-surfactant-stabilized foam has better enhanced oil recovery ability than conventional surfactant-stabilized foam due to its higher foaming ability, foam stability, and sweep efficiency improvement ability.