Microbial Foaming Agent Promoting Gas Field Recovery Efficiency

As gas field is getting older, it is common that liquid accumulation at the bottom of gas wells causes the sharply drop of gas production or even shutdown. Foaming, as one way to drain water out of wells, has developed into two kinds. Conventional foaming agent works chemically and unfriendly to environment, and sometimes is little useful when agent disagree with underground water in high temperature, salinity and condensate oil. However, microbial foaming agent is of low toxicity, no pollution, and easy degradation. Gaoqiao, as one of development units of Jingbian gas field, is still plagued with serious water accumulation after years’ efforts of chemical foaming. Thus, it is worthy to carry out microbial drainage, a systematic work, including foaming drainage principle, microbial strains selection, field experiment and effect analysis. The microbial foaming drainage has a great success in three aspects. Firstly, the microbial foaming agent can drain water more effective than chemical foaming. Secondly, with the help of microbial foam, 18 wells have an average production increase of more than 5000 m3/d and that of more than 0.5 million m3/a. Finally, the degradation of microbial foam drainage is no pollutant to nature.