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

STTR第一期项目更广泛的影响/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%的采收率，留下了大量的地下资源。现有的进一步提高采收率的方法价格昂贵，应用有限，而且可能会对环境造成破坏。该方法成本低，对环境影响小。我们的技术不使用化学品或添加剂，从而避免了污染地面和地表水资源的风险。我们的方法不是钻探数千口新井，而是振兴老油田，几乎不需要对现有基础设施和作业程序进行修改。它将允许较老的油田继续运营，提供收入、就业和税收，同时增加我们的国内石油储量，并进一步使其多样化。开发这些目前无法开采的石油资源可以使油价长期稳定在合理水平，并为小型运营商提供新的商机。STTR第一阶段项目建议测量几个石油储集层的润湿性，并确定更好地描述原油矿物表面和表面活性成分之间相互作用所需的平衡常数。这些常量将被添加到一个地化模型中，以评估模型预测润湿性的能力。油藏中的润湿性受到很好的约束，目前依赖于界面能的公式不能准确地描述观测结果，提供的预测能力也很低。目前的润湿性测量方法依赖于流体性质来推断界面能，因为直接测量岩石与石油之间的界面能是困难的。使用地球化学法，我们可以显式地表示构成界面能的静电和范德华力。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施。我们的目标是证明我们可以使用标准的化学方法测量重要的反应，这些测量可以用于地化模型来计算润湿性，这些模型可以用于预测润湿性作为水化学的函数，从而实现更有效的注水和提高石油采收率的技术。

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.