Experimental Data Analysis of Nanoparticles for Enhanced Oil Recovery

Abstract

Enhanced oil recovery with nanometer-sized particles is an attractive topic in the industry because of the various advantages brought about by the size. Since nanoparticles have not been applied widely on a field scale, core flooding tests are the best method to study and evaluate oil recovery improvement mechanisms. Different from previous review papers that discussed this research area case by case, our paper investigated nanoparticle core flooding research from a data statistics perspective. Thirty-nine published studies with a total of 240 laboratory core flooding tests using nanoparticles were included for this study. A data set was constructed by collecting all relevant information available from those publications. Histograms, the combination of box plots and violin plots, bar charts, and scatter plots were utilized for visualization of the statistical analysis. We displayed the distribution of relevant parameters and the relationship between some of them. Special cases were explained, and the uniqueness of the corresponding studies was discussed. Results show that on the laboratory scale, studies reveal an incremental oil recovery as high as 30% of the original oil in place. However, the most frequent range is 5%. Wettability alternation and interfacial tension (IFT) reduction were the two most studied mechanisms. The result of contact angle tests and IFT tests could indicate the enhanced oil recovery performance of nanoparticles in core flooding tests. In addition, it was discovered that several aspects of nanoparticles need to be researched further for a better understanding.

Department(s)

Geosciences and Geological and Petroleum Engineering

Keywords and Phrases

Contact angle; Floods; Nanoparticles; Oil well flooding; Particle size analysis; Testing, Core flooding test; Data statistics; Enhanced oil recovery; Experimental data analysis; Improvement mechanism; Nanometer-sized particles; Oil recoveries; Original oil in places, Enhanced recovery

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

0888-5885

Document Type

Article - Journal

Document Version

Citation

File Type

text

Language(s)

English

Rights

© 2019 American Chemical Society (ACS), All rights reserved.

Publication Date

01 Jun 2019

Link to Full Text

Share

 
COinS