Foam Modeling Approaches in Enhanced Oil Recovery: A Review

Background/Objectives: Nowadays, gas injection is one of a convenient method to increase oil recovery. The drawbacks of gas injection have been solved, to some extent, via introducing the foam assisted process. In order to accomplish an advantageous foam flooding a suitable model for foam is required to be able to predict the foam behavior appropriately. Analysis: This paper describes the basic concept of foam as well as different foam model approaches for foam assisted process in Enhanced Oil Recovery. In addition, pros and cons of each approach has been tabulated and discussed. Finding: We able to provide the advantages and disadvantages of each modeling approach as well as those parameters which have a significant effect on each model. The result depicted that, the best way to simulate the foam flooding in the commercial simulator is the Empirical approach. However, this model is not able to predict the behavior of foam in unsteady state properly. Novelty: The lack of a brief and informative study about basic of foam modeling approaches is the motivation of this study. Accordingly, this study presents the general overview in foam models which has been developed in the past three decades.