
Saeid SadeghnejadFriedrich Schiller University Jena | FSU
Saeid Sadeghnejad
Doctor of Philosophy
Tarbiat Modares University
About
97
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Introduction
My focus of research is on applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning in porous media during the energy transition period. The focus is on pore scale modeling and finding the mechanism of subsurface flow through porous media.
Skills and Expertise
Publications
Publications (97)
Recent predictive analytics and soft computing methods enhanced the exploration of new hydrocarbon reserves. Machine learning (ML) has showed a promising role in oil and gas explorations in recent years. Among the applications, determining a proper location for injection and production wells along with their optimum operating conditions is a comple...
Excessive water production is one of the main problems of mature reservoirs, which reduces hydrocarbon production and economic reservoir lifetime, and may pose severe environmental issues. Injection of pH-sensitive microgel is one of the most recently developed methods that can be used for both water shut-off and deep conformance control purposes....
Excessive water production increases operational costs and causes environmental issues. The water source can be from either aquifer encroachment or breakthrough during waterflooding. Implementing polymer gels is one of the improved oil recovery (IOR) methods used for water shutoff purposes. This technique has many advantages, including more flexibi...
Conventional and unconventional hydrocarbon rocks have complicated pore structures with heterogeneities distributed over various length scales (from nanometre to centimetre or even larger scales). Effective characterization of the properties of such rocks based on their digital twins is a challenging task. Digital rock physics (DRP) can be used to...
Pore-scale properties can be obtained by building a reliable digital twin of porous media through the digital rock physics (DRP) workflow. The two prerequisites of DRP are reliable imaging and computing power. Determining a proper image resolution that can reveal the actual pore-scale properties is challenging as there is a trade-off between the re...
Multi-scale modelling techniques are commonly used to characterize heterogeneous rock samples. However, open challenges limit the efficiency of these models. A significant issue is the tradeoff between resolution and field of view (FoV) during imaging. Capturing an image of a heterogeneous rock sample that includes pores of different scales with a...
This research investigates the interactions between a novel environmentally friendly chemical fluid consisting of Xanthan gum and bio-based surfactants, and crude oil. The surfactants, derived from various leaves using the spray drying technique, were characterized using Fourier-transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, zeta potential analysis, Dynam...
This project investigated the impact of low-temperature, in-situ synthesis of cerium oxide (CeO2) nanoparticles on various aspects of oil recovery mechanisms, including changes in oil viscosity, alterations in reservoir rock wettability, and the resulting oil recovery factor. The nanoparticles were synthesized using a microemulsion procedure and su...
The anticipation of fluid transport behavior within porous media holds significant importance in a diverse array of applications, encompassing subsurface hydrology (Hu and Pfingsten 2023); petroleum industry (Moslemipour and Sadeghnejad 2021), geothermal energy utilization (Meller et al. 2017), and secure subsurface storage of hydrogen or CO2 (Esfa...
Due to the escalating levels of greenhouse gas emissions and the growing global need for energy, there is a requirement for innovative technologies to produce eco-friendly power [1]. Hydrogen (H2) stands as a sustainable energy for the future, and its incorporation into the worldwide economic framework is imperative [2]. To facilitate H2 as a low-c...
Renewable energy is attracting widespread interest worldwide as it emits minimal greenhouse gases, thereby aiding in the fight against climate change resulting from the use of fossil fuels [1]. Hydrogen (H2) is suggested as a reliable energy carrier to address the fluctuations in energy supply faced by renewable energy sources [2]. It can be stored...
Understanding the properties of rocks is crucial in various porous media, especially in heterogeneous carbonate and tight sandstone rocks. Digital Rock Physics (DRP) has emerged as a valuable tool, which is grounded in imaging and computation. Techniques like industrial X-ray CT and FIB-SEM are usually used for image acquisition in DRP. However, th...
Rising Carbon Dioxide (CO2) levels from human activities are driving climate change. Carbon capture and storage (CCS) during enhanced oil recovery (EOR) in underground reservoirs offer both environmental and economic benefits. This method boosts oil production, cuts greenhouse gas emissions, and supports sustainable energy. Precise well placement i...
The lithology log, an integral component of the master log, graphically portrays the encountered lithological sequence during drilling operations. In addition to offering real-time cross-sectional insights, lithology logs greatly aid in correlating and evaluating multiple sections efficiently. This paper introduces a novel workflow reliant on an en...
In the workflow of digital rock physics, obtaining high-resolution rock images is crucial for accurately predicting rock parameters. The image resolution is dictated by the imaging technique, which often leads to a trade-off between image resolution and field of view. To address this challenge, super-resolution convolutional neural networks (SRCNNs...
Particle transport and deposition in porous media play a crucial role in subsurface contaminant transport, underground gas storage, and enhanced oil recovery. Accurate prediction of permeability alterations using numerical methods is of the utmost importance. Recent advancements in imaging technology and digital rock physics, have facilitated the e...
This study introduces a novel approach for generating realistic 3D unstructured multi-scale binary images of heterogeneous rock samples. The integration of pores at different scales into a unified image poses a significant challenge in multi-scale modeling. To address this, the proposed method utilizes a distinct reconstruction strategy that separa...
The present study introduces an enhanced deep learning (DL) workflow based on transfer learning (TL) for producing high-resolution synthetic graphic well logs (SGWLs). To examine the scalability of the proposed workflow, a carbonate reservoir with a high geological heterogeneity has been chosen as the case study, and the developed workflow is evalu...
More than half of the world's oil is reserved in heterogeneous carbonate and tight sandstone rocks. A comprehensive understanding of rock properties is essential for efficient production from these reservoirs. Digital rock physics (DRP) is an approach that has been used in recent years to evaluate rock properties on the pore scale. Image acquisitio...
Subsurface transport of colloids is of critical importance in various engineering and scientific applications, such as groundwater transport, underground H2 or CO2 storage, oil and gas reservoirs, and geothermal energy [1]. Migration and deposition of such particles can significantly alter the physical properties of porous media [2,3]. In recent ye...
The necessity to scale energy storage capacities in Europe is vital for expanding renewable energy production and avoiding shortcomings in energy supply. In decarbonizing energy systems, hydrogen, in its diverse colors, will play a crucial role as an energy carrier. Storing hydrogen in the subsurface comes with various uncertainties. Independent in...
Understanding the fluid flow through porous media is essential in different scientific and engineering fields, such as geosciences, petroleum engineering, and subsurface hydrogen or CO2 storage. Predicting velocity fields in pore spaces is exceptionally challenging, which is usually determined by either numerically via solving governing transport e...
Resampling is an interpolation technique that is used to increase (upsampling) or decrease (downsampling) the resolution of images by the desired ratio. Upsampling or downsampling and changing the resolution of images to fuse them with different resolutions is one of the most important applications of resampling methods in the digital rock physics...
In-situ synthesis of nanoparticles is a new approach to use nanoparticles in enhanced oil recovery (EOR) operations. This method synthesizes the nanomaterial under reservoir conditions and uses the reservoir's energy, which has several advantages over synthesizing these particles out of the reservoir and then injecting them into the reservoir by a...
The evolution of pore structure caused by particle retention is a function of heterogeneity and non-linear coupling of particle transport and fluid flow. Pore-scale modelling enable us to elucidate the role of various mechanisms controlling particle transport and deposition. This study incorporated the Eulerian-Lagrangian approach to investigate th...
Stylolites are natural rock-rock interlocked interfaces that may produce spectacular rough patterns in formation rocks [1]. They form by a localized dissolution process, and their interface contains minerals at concentrations different from that in surrounding host rocks. The presence of stylolites, with various amounts of clays, may affect fluid f...
Solute transport containing particles is essential in various applications, including filtration industry, subsurface contaminant transport in hydrology or environmental engineering, formation damage in the petroleum industry, and subsurface biocolloids or microorganism transport [1-4]. The evolution of pore-scale structure because of particle rete...
The two paradigms of digital rock physics, chemistry, and biology are imaging and computation (Sadeghnejad et al. 2021). An unbiased characterization of rocks not only requires a sample with a sufficient volume (i.e., representative elementary volume, REV) to account for sample heterogeneity but also requires a high-resolution image with enough por...
Image segmentation remains the most critical step in Digital Rock Physics (DRP) workflows, affecting the analysis of physical rock properties. Conventional segmentation techniques struggle with numerous image artifacts and user bias, which lead to considerable uncertainty. This study evaluates the advantages of using the random forest (RF) algorith...
Waterflooding is widely implemented to enhance oil recovery. The displacement efficiency of this method depends on multiple factors, including makeup water properties, native oil, and formation rock. The incompatibility of the injected fluid with the pore fluid can result in a chemical non-equilibrium state within porous media that may result in di...
In the field of chemical enhanced oil recovery (CEOR), alkaline surfactant polymer (ASP) flooding has gotten major attention. ASP is a combination of alkaline flooding, surfactant flooding and polymer flooding, in which alkaline, surfactant and polymer are added to the same solution slug. This creates a synergy between the alkaline, surfactant and...
Microbial activities are in the focus of interest in many subsurface studies, including contaminant hydrogeology, microbial enhance oil recovery, geo-methanation processes (e.g., in situ conversion of CO2/H2 to methane), and deep geothermal systems. Microbial growth and biomass/biofilm deposition in the subsurface influence the hydrodynamic propert...
Identifying the location of lithological boundaries is one of the essential steps of reservoir characterizations. The manual well-to-well correlation is usually implemented to identify lithological boundaries. Various automated methods were introduced to accelerate this correlation; however, most of them use single well-log data. As each well-log c...
pH-sensitive microgel flooding is a deep conformance control technique in which the microgel viscosity depends on formation pH. Lowering the formation pH by an acid pre-flushing treatment guarantees easy injection of these microgels. The applications of these microgels were mainly dedicated to sandstones in the literature. However, this study provi...
Conventional and unconventional hydrocarbon rocks have complicated pore structures with heterogeneities distributed over various length scales (from nanometre to centimetre or even larger scales). Effective characterization of the properties of such rocks based on their digital twins is a challenging task. Digital rock physics (DRP) can be used to...
Petroleum reservoir modeling procedure for production optimization is a complex problem and requires significant computational costs -rooted in reservoir simulation and postprocessing. The advent of Artificial Intelligence -particularly supervised machine learning algorithms- in the petroleum industry is gained much popularity because of efficient...
Nowadays, digital rock physics (DRP) has enabled us to obtain comprehensive and accurate information from porous media and a better understanding of physics at the pore scale. Advances in the micro-computed tomography technology (µCT) have led to high-quality, high-resolution images from rock samples. However, this increase in image quality or reso...
Improving conformance control in reservoirs with a heterogeneous permeability distribution is the objective of many enhanced oil recovery (EOR) methods. In recent years, the injection of preformed particle gels (PPG) is suggested as an effective EOR method to control the in-depth conformance of waterfronts. In this study, a new mathematical transpo...
Vuggy carbonate rocks have a complex geometry with pore size ranges from nano to several millimeters (e.g., vugs). Compared to other rocks (e.g., sandstones), this multiscale nature makes pore-scale studies very challenging. Vugs have significant effects on rock properties (e.g., porosity, permeability, capillary pressure, etc.) by establishing hig...
Visualizing fluid flow in porous media can provide a better understanding of transport phenomena at the pore scale. In this regard, transparent micromodels are suitable tools to investigate fluid flow in porous media. However, using glass as the primary material makes them inappropriate for predicting the natural behavior of rocks. Moreover, constr...
Determining the distribution of optimal injection and production wells along with their operating conditions is a complex problem. The objective of this study is to compare the effectiveness of an experimental based approach (central composite design, CCD) with a machine learning method (xGBoost) in a well-placement optimization application.
In thi...
Vuggy carbonate rocks have a complex geometry with pore size ranges from nano to several millimeters (e.g., vugs). Compared to other rocks (e.g., sandstones), this multiscale nature makes pore-scale studies very challenging. Vugs have significant effects on rock properties (e.g., porosity, permeability, capillary pressure, etc.) by establishing hig...
Pore network extraction is mostly used for constructing digital cores and computing complex rock properties. However, this method strongly depends on the quality of CT-scanning, which can vary due to several factors (e.g., low X-Ray radiation exposure time). The segmentation of these images needs several processing steps to obtain a segmented image...
Carbonate rocks have often a complicated flow behavior due to their complex pore-structure. A problem in modeling of these rocks is dealing with the multiple spatial scales inherent to the availability of vugs. These vugs can alter flow paths because of creation of a multi-modal porosity system with different inter-connectivity at pore scale. This...
The response of gas condensate reservoirs is directly influenced by heterogeneity. In such reservoirs, condensate is created around wellbore areas, when the reservoir pressure falls below the dew point pressure. Consequently, the distribution of this condensate bank makes fluid flow in the reservoir even more complicated by changing rock-fluid prop...
Waterflooding in fractured reservoirs is a challenging task due to the presence of high conductive flow pathways such as fractures. Much of the injected water passes through fractures without sweeping the oil in the low permeable area, which results in an early breakthrough. Implementing deep conformance control techniques can be a remedy for this...
Acid fracturing is one of the most widely used methods in the reservoir stimulation process for higher oil production. This method in carbonate reservoirs has a crucial role in enhanced oil recovery. Acid fracturing in fractured carbonate reservoirs changes fracture opening due to the reaction between the injected acid and minerals at the surface o...
Engineered water (EW) flooding is one of the enhanced oil recovery (EOR) techniques in carbonate reservoirs. In this method, the wettability of reservoir rock is altered by controlling the amount of various ions in the injected brine. The thermodynamics of wettability is related to the surface interactions and stability of water film on a rock surf...
Waterflooding in fractured reservoirs is a challenging task due to the presence of high conductive flow pathways such as fractures. Much of the injected water passes through fractures without sweeping the oil in the low permeable area, which results in an early breakthrough. Implementing deep conformance control techniques can be a remedy for this...
Reactive flows in porous media have complex behavior that is influenced by the properties of rocks (e.g., composition, structure) and fluids. In this study, the interaction of citric acid, as a weak acid, with a sandstone core containing ankerite cement was investigated during matrix acidizing. The model, developed in Python, implemented a global i...
This study describes the composition-property relationship of a dual chemically and physically cross-linked nanohydrogel (NHG) containing a high concentration of hydrophilic pH-sensitive acrylic acid (AA). The physical and chemical cross-linking were incorporated using the aggregation of hydrophobic butyl acrylate (BA) and covalent bond of a bifunc...
Vugular carbonate rocks have a complicated flow behavior because of their multimodal porosity system, with different interconnectivity at the pore scale. In this study, a new hybrid algorithm to reconstruct a bimodal vugular porous medium is introduced by coupling the pore-network modeling approach (i.e., stochastic) with the image-based network te...
Hypothesis:
A cross-linked amphiphilic nanogel containing a high mole% of hydrophilic pH-responsive moiety can provide enhanced functionality regarding stimuli-responsiveness, water-dispersibility, hydrophobic substance loading, and structural stability under harsh environmental conditions. These nanogels could be synthesized using a one-pot proce...
onepetro.org
Quantitative Monitoring of Cleaning Time and Wettability Alteration of Carbonate Rocks During Soxhlet Cleaning
Pouya Soltani, Saeid Sadeghnejad, Amir Hossein Saeedi Dehaghani, Rahim Ashena
SPE Reservoir Evaluation & Engineering, 2019
Core analysis is one of the most important steps in formation evaluation. The availability of routine-c...
scientiairanica.sharif.edu
Simulation Optimization of Water Alternating Gas (WAG) Process under Operational Constraints: A Case Study in the Persian Gulf
Saeid Sadeghnejad, Mehrdad Manteghian, Hosein Ruzsaz
Scientia Iranica, 2019
Optimizing the efficiency of WAG flooding projects can guarantee the success of these projects. Many operational constra...
The low salinity water injection has become one of the most important studies in the oil industry for improving oil recovery compared to conventional seawater injection. Thus, extensive studies have been conducted in carbonate and sandstone reservoirs to investigate how the physical properties of rocks and the chemical composition of fluids influen...
The knowledge of geological strata sequences and their exact boundaries depths is of a great importance in the characterization of oil and gas reservoirs. The aim of automated well-to-well correlation approaches is to facilitate and accelerate the procedure of geological boundary detection. In this study, we implement an automatic well-to-well corr...
Condensate dropout around a wellbore causes many practical difficulties. It complicates the prediction of fluid flow around a wellbore, especially during well test interpretations. Many researchers have explored the impact of gas condensing on the transient behavior of well-test responses. However, much less attention were paid to the analysis of t...
Cross-linked polymer gels are a new type of temporary plugging agent and are mainly used to control the leakage of fluid during drilling, completion, and workover operations. Improving the mechanical strength and plugging performance of these materials enables them to resist tough wellbore conditions (e.g., high pressure and high temperature). In t...
Determination of optimum location for drilling a new well not only requires engineering judgments but also consumes excessive computational time. Additionally, availability of many physical constraints such as the well length, trajectory, and completion type and the numerous affecting parameters including, well type, well numbers, well-control vari...
Implementing pH-triggered polymer is an efficient way to improve the conformance control of hydrocarbon formations. pH-triggered polymer solutions have high mobility in low pH conditions, while due to their high swelling capacity in higher pH values, their viscosity increases with pH increment. Therefore, they can fill high permeability zones/strat...
The aim of this study is to characterize and find the location of geological boundaries in different wells across a reservoir. Automatic detection of the geological boundaries can facilitate the matching of the stratigraphic layers in a reservoir and finally can lead to a correct reservoir rock characterization. Nowadays, the well-to-well correlati...
Determination of the connectivity and conductivity of porous media is of great importance in evaluation of fluid transport in different systems including petroleum formations, ground water hydrology, and contaminant transport. Among the conventional methods for connectivity forecasting, the percolation approach is an efficient method that can provi...
The excess water production is one of the crucial problems in petroleum industry. One of the remedies to reduce the amount of water cut is Hydrogel injection. Hydrogel has a porous three dimensional structure of cross-linked polymer. One of the main properties of these gel systems is disproportionate permeability reduction (DPR) for water phase. Th...
The effectiveness of secondary recovery methods in reservoir development studies depends on the knowledge about how fluid-carrying regions (i.e. good-quality rock types) are connected between injection and production wells. To estimate reservoir performance uncertainty, comprehensive simulations on many reservoir model realisations are necessary, w...
The injection of preformed particle gels (PPGs) is one of the novel solutions to improve conformance control in mature waterflooded reservoirs. In this method, the interaction between PPGs and pore structure controls the performance of the PPG solution in reservoir heterogeneity correction. Thus, the behavior evaluation of these deformable particle...
onepetro.org
Effect of injection pattern arrangements on formation connectivity during water flooding
Parishad Javaheri, Saeid Sadeghnejad
SPE Europec featured at 79th EAGE Conference and Exhibition, 2017
Water flooding is one of the most common methods during secondary recovery. The management of water injection can enhance the productivity of wel...
Polymer flooding is a well-known commercial method among enhanced oil recovery (EOR) methods. Despite its successful development, this method could still be improved considerably by utilizing new polymeric materials and systems. The main objective of this study is the implementation of smart-covered polymer particles (SCPP) prepared by multistep in...
Preformed particle gel (PPG) treatment is now one of the most effective remediation techniques for conformance controlling and selective plugging of high-water flow conduits in mature water-flooded oil reservoirs. Recognizing the intrinsic properties of PPGs, e.g., the swelling ratio, in reservoir condition is of prime importance to the optimizatio...
The aim of well-to-well correlation is to detect similar geological boundaries in two or more wells across a formation, which is usually done manually. The construction of such a correlation by hand for a field with several wells is quite complex and also time-consuming as well. The aim of this study is to speed up the well-to-well correlation proc...
The outcome of the classic percolation approach is several power-law curves with some universal (critical) exponents. Here, the universality means that these power laws as well as their critical exponents, which control the global properties of a system, are independent of its details. Classic percolation considers the connectivity between two line...
Estimating available hydrocarbon to be produced during secondary oil recovery is an ongoing activity in field development. The primary plan is normally scheduled during early stage of field’s life through master development plan studies. During this period, due to the lake of certain data, estimation of the field efficiency is usually based on rule...
One of the major applications of percolation theory in petroleum engineering is investigation of connectivity in complex formations. Production normally is achieved through a heterogeneous porous media. Proper assessment of connectivity of formation considering its heterogeneity is important in formation evaluation. Percolation assumes that heterog...
Gas injection into the heavy oil reservoirs is one of the common methods to enhance the oil recovery, but due to low viscosity of CO2, poor sweep efficiency is a disadvantage of this EOR process. 1 CO2 breakthrough time is affected by the system condition. Increasing the pressure makes the gas supercritical and improves its viscosity. Therefore, th...