STTR Phase I: Novel Water Flooding Technique to Enhance Oil Recovery

STTR第一阶段项目的更广泛的影响/商业潜力是开发一种新的注水技术，以提高石油采收率。 目前最好的技术仅限于30 - 50%的回收率，在地下留下大量资源。 现有的进一步提高回收率的方法费用昂贵，应用有限，并可能造成环境破坏。 所提出的方法成本低得多，对环境的影响最小。 我们的技术不使用化学品或添加剂，从而避免了污染地下水和地表水资源的风险。 我们的方法不是钻成千上万口新威尔斯井，而是振兴老油田，对现有基础设施和操作程序几乎不需要修改。 它将使老油田继续运营，提供收入，就业和税收，同时增加和进一步多样化我们的国内石油储备。 开发这些目前无法开采的石油资源，可以使石油价格长期稳定在合理水平，并为小型经营者提供新的商业机会。 该STTR第一阶段项目建议测量几个油藏的润湿性，并确定更好地描述矿物表面和原油表面活性组分之间相互作用所需的平衡常数。 这些常数将被添加到地球化学模型中，以评估模型预测润湿性的能力。 石油储层中的润湿性受到很差的约束，并且依赖于界面能的当前公式不能准确地描绘观察结果并且提供很少的预测能力。 目前的润湿性测量方法依赖于流动特性来推断界面能，因为很难直接测量岩石和油之间的界面能。 使用地球化学方法，我们可以明确地表示静电和货车范德华力，使界面能。 这种方法将产生润湿性的定量公式，可以在标准的地球化学模型中实现。 我们的目标是证明，我们可以使用标准的化学方法来测量的重要反应，这些测量可用于地球化学模型来计算润湿性和模型可用于预测润湿性作为水化学的功能，使技术更有效的水驱和提高石油采收率。

The broader impact/commercial potential of this STTR Phase I project is to develop a new water flood technology to increase oil recovery. The best current technology is limited to 30 - 50% recovery leaving significant resources in the ground. The available methods to further increase recovery are expensive, have limited application and can cause environmental damage. The proposed method is much lower cost and has minimal environmental impact. Our technique does not use chemicals or additives thus avoiding the risk of contaminating ground and surface water resources. Rather than drill thousands of new wells, our approach revitalizes old fields and requires little modification to the existing infrastructure and operational procedures. It would allow older fields to continue to operate, providing revenues, jobs and taxes while increasing and further diversifying our domestic oil reserves. Development of these currently unrecoverable oil resources could enable long-term stabilization of oil prices at reasonable levels and offer new business opportunities for small operators. This STTR Phase I project proposes to measure the wettability in several petroleum reservoirs and to determine the equilibrium constants required to better describe the interaction between mineral surfaces and surface-active components of crude oil. These constants will be added to a geochemical model to evaluate the capability of the models to predict wettability. Wettability in petroleum reservoirs is poorly constrained, and current formulations that depend on interfacial energy cannot accurately portray the observations and offer little predictive capability. The current wettability measurement methodologies rely on flow properties to infer interfacial energy because it is difficult to directly measure the interfacial energy between rock and oil. Using a geochemical approach, we can explicitly represent the electrostatic and van der Waals force that make up the interfacial energy. This approach will produce quantitative formulations of wettability that can be implemented in standard geochemical models. Our goals are to demonstrate that we can measure the important reactions using standard chemical methodologies, that these measurements can be used in geochemical models to calculate wettability and that the models can be used to predict wettability as a function of water chemistry, for enabling techniques for more effective water flooding and enhanced oil recovery.