Perpustakaan Digital ITB

MEOR process has long been expected to offer an environment friendly and a low-cost approach to improve oil recovery by examining various types of microorganisms in the laboratory for their ability to be applied in a specific reservoir. On the other hand, implementing this technology requires a forecasting future performance technique prior to an economic evaluation. There are several numerical approaches of MEOR simulation model to study microorganism behavior in order to forecast future production performance. This approach using a finite differential formulation and takes a long time to build a MEOR simulator based on it. Thus, this research proposes a new simpler approach that combines the laboratory work providing incubation time, biosurfactant concentrations, and interfacial tensions using Gibbs equation relating biosurfactant concentrations and interfacial tension, Pelofsky equation relating interfacial tension and oil viscosity, and Bryant and Lockhart equation relating injection rate and radius, to provide fluid properties data for reservoir simulation using conventional commercial simulator. The reservoir simulation was conducted using a commercial blackoil reservoir simulator and applied three different oil characteristics, i.e., A1 for light oil, A2 for medium oil and A3 for heavy oil. Research results of MEOR from the own laboratory experiment, producing biosurfactant concentrations respect to incubation time and interfacial tension reduction, can be used for the reference data to simulate MEOR process using a conventional commercial simulator applying all the three correlations. After MEOR application, for time of simulations of 24 months, the increasing of cumulative oil production of the oil A1 sample between 8.2–14.4%, for the oil A2 sample between 7.7–26.2% and for the oil A3 sample between 6.7–32.1%. The percentages change of cumulative oil production suggests that MEOR work properly when applied to medium or heavy oil.