Heavy oil extraction is mostly based on thermal EOR processes. Warming up the reservoir reduces oil viscosity, makes it more mobile and in turn enhances heavy oil recovery. The most prominent thermal heavy oil EOR method relies on steam injection. This recovery process consumes high quantities of fresh water and energy to produce the steam, and heat loss due to reservoir heterogeneities and thief zones must be minimized. For that purpose, steam foams can be used to decrease steam mobility and improve its utilization by a better distribution in the reservoir. Selection of appropriate products for steam harsh temperature conditions poses several challenges regarding chemicals stability and foam durability. We have shown in previous papers that synergistic association of thermally stable surfactants can highly improve high temperature foaming performances. Here, we extend these results to specific surfactant formulations designed to provide enhanced bulk viscosity. These formulations are intended to compensate for the strong decrease of water viscosity with temperature. This is expected to enhance steam foams lifetime and in turn provide a better steam mobility control in application conditions.

Bulk foam half-life is highly dependent on experimental conditions, in particular on the initial state of the foam in terms of quality and bubble size. This is even truer for steam foams that are also highly sensitive to possible temperature gradients. An optimized experimental setup has been developed to evaluate high temperature foam half-life obtained with standard and enhanced viscosity formulations. We couple these measurements with rheology and mobility reduction evaluation in sandpack experiments.

Based on these various parameters, we try to extract correlations between bulk steam foam half-life, bulk viscosity and mobility reduction in porous media.

This paper describes the characteristics of newly developed enhanced viscosity surfactant formulations, and also provides data regarding impact of viscosity on high temperature foam stability and mobility reduction.