Doctoral Dissertations

Haifeng Ding

Keywords and Phrases

Conformance Control; Enhanced Oil Recovery; Nanogel; Nanoparticle

Abstract

"Enhanced oil recovery (EOR) using nanometer-sized particles has drawn great attention in the oil industry because of their various advantages brought by size. However, their applications on a field scale are very limited, especially for deformable nanoparticles. The objective of this research is to explore the transport behavior of deformable polymeric nanoparticles (nanogel), the factors impacting these behavior, and their EOR potentials. First, 240 published nanoparticle core flooding experiment data were collected and analyzed about the extent to what the nanoparticles can improve oil recovery. Results show that on the laboratory scale the incremental oil recovery could be as high as 30% of the original oil in place while most studies reported increments around 5%. Secondly, constant pressure-driven filtration tests were conducted to study how different factors would affect the near-wellbore transport of nanogel. It is found that nanogel in lower salinity environment or high concentration results in higher resistance factors. The nanogel injectivity increases with the permeability but has no noticeable impact by the driven pressure. Third, the impacts of nanogel injection velocity on nanogel transport and oil recovery improvement have been investigated. Due to the shear-thinning behavior of nanogel, resistance factors are higher with lower nanogel injection rates regardless of whether the oil is presented in the porous media or not. Nanogel flooding velocity impacts residual resistance factors in an oil-and-water two-phase condition but not in a water-only one-phase condition. Finally, the effect of the crosslinker concentration on the physicochemical properties of nanogel, adsorbing behaviors, and the oil recovery improvement were investigated. Results show that the nanogel with a higher crosslinker concentration and a lower swelling ratio has lower dispersion viscosity, less adsorption, and less oil recovery improvement"--Abstract, page iv.

Advisor(s)

Bai, Baojun

Committee Member(s)

Wei, Mingzhen
Dunn-Norman, Shari
Wronkiewicz, David J.
Deng, Wen

Department(s)

Geosciences and Geological and Petroleum Engineering

Degree Name

Ph. D. in Petroleum Engineering

Publisher

Missouri University of Science and Technology

Publication Date

Spring 2020

Journal article titles appearing in thesis/dissertation

  • Experimental data analysis of nanoparticles for enhanced oil recovery
  • An investigation of factors influencing the near-wellbore transport of nanogel
  • A laboratory study of impacts of flow rate on nanogel transport and oil recovery improvement
  • Impacts of crosslinker concentration on nanogel properties and enhanced oil recovery capability

Pagination

xv, 150 pages

Note about bibliography

Includes bibliographic references.

Rights

© 2020 Haifeng Ding, All rights reserved.

Document Type

Dissertation - Open Access

File Type

text

Language

English

Thesis Number

T 11671

Electronic OCLC #

1164718786

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