Surfactant in Fracturing Fluid: Enhancing Imbibition Oil Recovery or Blocking Pore Throats?
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Low recovery of fracturing water is partly due to fracturing fluid leak-off into formation and water trapping in matrix. In our previous studies (Soleiman Asl et al. 2019 and Yuan et al. 2019), we showed that using surfactant solutions in fracturing fluid can significantly enhance imbibition oil recovery. However, there is one critical question remained unanswered: What are the consequences of these additives on well performance during flowback and post-flowback processes? Can they block the pore-throats of rock matrix and induce formation damage? To answer this question, we develop and apply a comprehensive laboratory protocol on a tight core plug to simulate leak-off and flowback processes under reservoir pressure, with and without initial water saturation (Swi). We evaluate the possibility of pore-throat blockage by comparing pore-throat size distribution of the core plug and size distribution of the particles formed in a microemulsion (ME) solution. We also investigate the effects of Swi on effective oil permeability (koeff) after the flowback process. The results of leak-off and flowback tests using tap water as the base case shows that koeff after flowback is lower than that before the leak-off, mainly due to phase trapping. However, results of the tests using the ME solution show that koeff after flowback is greater than koeff before leak-off. This observation suggests that the leak-off of ME solution enhances regained oil relative permeability during flowback by reducing phase trapping and water blockage. When Swi = 0, the blockage of leaked-off fluid reduces koeff during the flowback process. The mean size of self-assembled structures (referred to as "particles" here) formed by mixing the ME solution with water is around 10-20 nm. The MICP profile of the core sample shows that around 95% of pore throats are bigger than the size of formed particles, suggesting low chance of pore-throat blockage by the suspended particles.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it