Maintaining sustainable oil production is possible, largely, due to successful application of technologies for wellbore zone treatment, in particular, selective acidizing of carbonate reservoirs. Reservoir heterogeneity results in poor conformance, uneven distribution of displacement agent, and, consequently, forming of flushed zones with low flow coefficients. This leads to increased water production and higher water cut of produced oil, while, low-permeability layers remain underproduced, or even bypassed. Selective acidizing of productive layers might be a good solution in this case. The mechanism of selective acidizing is based on temporary blocking of flushed (fractured) intervals with some high-viscosity system (a kind of “liquid plug”) inert to acid and solved with oil while production. High-concentration hydrophobic water-in-oil emulsions meet these requirements to the point. They are characterized by a wide range of viscosity control, fr om few dozens of centipoise to dozens of thousands of centipoise, up to non-flowing, as well as by controllable physical properties, including yield point (static and dynamic shear stress), thixotropic properties (structure strengthening with time), non-Newtonian rheology (pseudoplastic and/or viscoelastic flow).
This paper presents results of studies aimed at development of special formulations of high-concentration hydrophobic emulsions to be used in challenging conditions of fractured-cavernous reservoirs, wh ere conventional hydrophobic emulsions fail to block permeable zones and direct acid systems to target intervals. The designed formulation of high-concentration hydrophobic emulsion provides for enhanced blocking properties needed to redirect the injected acid systems from the fractured (and, as a rule, water-saturated) zones to oil-saturated matrix zones, high-performance killing of wells during workover operations, and enhanced water shutoff properties, resulting in overall cost saving.
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