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Evaluation of the ability of the hydrophobic nanoparticles of SiOin the EOR process through carbonate rock samples Mohammad-Ali Ahmadia, Zainal Ahmadb, Le Thi Kim Phungc, Tomoaki Kashiw

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Petroleum Science and Technology

ISSN: 1091-6466 (Print) 1532-2459 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/lpet20

Evaluation of the ability of the hydrophobic

carbonate rock samples

Mohammad-Ali Ahmadi, Zainal Ahmad, Le Thi Kim Phung, Tomoaki Kashiwao & Alireza Bahadori

To cite this article: Mohammad-Ali Ahmadi, Zainal Ahmad, Le Thi Kim Phung, Tomoaki

Kashiwao & Alireza Bahadori (2016) Evaluation of the ability of the hydrophobic nanoparticles

of SiO2 in the EOR process through carbonate rock samples, Petroleum Science and Technology, 34:11-12, 1048-1054, DOI: 10.1080/10916466.2016.1148052

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10916466.2016.1148052

Published online: 12 Jul 2016

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Evaluation of the ability of the hydrophobic nanoparticles of SiOin the EOR process through carbonate rock samples

Mohammad-Ali Ahmadia, Zainal Ahmadb, Le Thi Kim Phungc, Tomoaki Kashiwaod,

and Alireza Bahadorie

aDepartment of Petroleum Engineering, Ahwaz Faculty of Petroleum Engineering, Petroleum University of Technology, Ahwaz, Iran;bSchool of Chemical Engineering, Engineering Campus, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Seri Ampangan, Nibong Tebal, Penang, Malaysia;cDepartment of Chemical process and Equipment, Faculty of Chemical Engineering, Hochiminh City University of Technology, Hochiminh City, Vietnam;dDepartment of Electronics and Control Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Niihama College, Yagumo-cho, Niihama, Ehime, Japan;eSchool of Environmental Science and Engineering, Southern Cross University, Lismore, Australia

KEYWORDS

Carbonate reservoir; hydrophobic; microemulsion; nanoparticle; oil reovery

ABSTRACT

More than 50% of oil remains in reservoirs after primary and secondary

recov-ery processes Consequently, methods of enhanced oil recovrecov-ery (EOR) should

be applied for more recovery from these reservoirs In this study the ability of

hydrophobic nanoparticles of sio2in EOR process through carbonate rock

sam-ples is studied By employing hydrophobic nanosilica, we can lower interfacial

tension between oil and nanofluid and then reduce the mobility ratio between

oil and nanofluid in carbonate reservoirs; however, nanosilica can increase the

viscosity of water exponentially To evaluate this goal, core displacement

exper-iment for carbonate core is conducted These experexper-iments are performed on

the carbonate samples saturated with oil and brine that had got injected with

nanosilica with six different concentrations Investigating the outcomes shows

that by rising nanoparticle concentration, the IFT between water and oil phases

decreases and yields in decrease the mobility ratio between oil and nanofluid

For this, we measure the recovery level in different states of using 0.05, 0.1,

0.1, 0.15, 0.3, 0.6, 1.0, and 0 concentration of the nanoparticle The outcomes

achieved from our experiments reveals that employing hydrophobic

nanosil-ica could increases the oil recovery factor

1 Introduction

Nanoscale science and technology is a young field that covers nearlyevery discipline of science and engi-neering The research on nanotechnology is evolving and expanding in such a rapid pace that the existing and potential applications can be considered almost endless An emerging application of nanotechnology

in oil reservoir engineering is developing new types of nanofluids for EOR, drilling, and so on Nanoflu-ids are colloidal suspensions of nanoparticles in a base fluid, which is commonly water or organic liquNanoflu-ids These fluids are prepared by introducing small volumetric fractions of nanoparticles into the liquid phase

in order to enhance or improve some of the fluid properties Recent investigations revealed that nanoma-terials have impressive characters for engineering applications Moreover, nanofluids can be designed to

be compatible with reservoir fluids/rocks and be environmentally friendly, and they may show improved

CONTACT Alireza Bahadori alireza.bahadori@scu.edu.au School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Southern Cross University Lismore Australia.

Color versions of one or more of the figures in the article can be found online at www.tandfonline.com/lpet.

deal of attention in recent years The first requirement for application of nanoparticles in EOR processes

is their ability to travel easily through the rock porous media i.e with minimal retention and formation damage Therefore the transport properties of nanoparticles in porous media have been considered a

silica nanoparticles, by injecting concentrated suspensions of the nanoparticles into sedimentary rocks

of different lithologies and permeabilities Their observations indicate a weak, reversible attachment of

which can be used in EOR processes to control the behavior of injected fluids by imposing an external field, or can be used to evaluate oil saturations and other properties of an EOR target formation Kanj et al (2009) carried out a series of core flood experiments to investigate the transport of nanopar-ticles in reservoir rocks and to identify the limiting size of nanoparnanopar-ticles to be used as in situ reservoir agents in the ARAB-D formation There have been some attempts to use nanoparticles to change wetta-bility of reservoir rock Considering the micrometer scale of pore diameters in reservoir rock Adsorption

of hydrophilic particles on the porous walls of an oil-wet reservoir rock can change it into a water-wet rock This will result in an increase in the relative permeability of the oil phase and thus a decrease in the relative permeability of the water phase and a decline in the water cut after water breakthrough Adsorption of particles with neutral wettability on porous walls will eliminate surface tension (Ju et al.,

2002)

surfaces Using experimental data, they developed a mathematical model and a simulator to simulate water injection dynamics under the conditions of hydrophobic polysilicon injection

changing the wettability of porous media The results of numerical simulation showed that porosity and permeability would decline due to retention of hydrophilic polysilicon during its transport in porous media It was also shown that oil recovery can be enhanced obviously by flooding with suspension of hydrophilic polysilicon; polysilicon concentration of 2.0–3.0% by volume has been suggested for

of both hydrophilic and hydrophobic polysilicon types have been later presented in another publication;

Di et al (2010) used injection of solutions containing hydrophobic nanoparticles of SiO2 Their

the surface of the porous wall to form a strong hydrophobic layer The core displacement experiments conducted on four core samples showed that the water-phase effective permeabilities of all cores after the treatment with hydrophobic nanoparticles increase, but at different rates An average increase in water-phase effective permeability has been reported to be about 47% for the tested core samples, which clearly shows that the flowing resistance of rock’s micro-channels decreases greatly after-treatment with

properties of nanosilica particles through the mechanism of microscopic flow diversion by log jamming, which involves pore blocking and diversion of injection fluids in microscopic pore scale They used core floods by well-defined nanosized silica particles to investigate the oil mobilization properties of the silica nanoparticles and made a comparison with polymer floods and the combination of polymer and silica particles They used AEROSIL MOX 80 silica particle type with a concentration of 300 ppm for core flood experiments This paper highlights the behavior of hydrophobic nanosilica in aqueous solutions

as agent to be implemented for EOR schemes in carbonates Displacement of the studied hydrophobic nanosilica was assessed using a core flooding apparatus

2 Experimental

2.1 Materials

Figure .The image of silica nano particles observed under TEM.

AEROSIL R816 purchase from Degussa Company Physical properties of AEROSIL R816 are

great extent on the intensity of the dispersing Therefore the dispersion method is of crucial importance

As recommended by the producing companies, good results are achieved with ultrasonic homogenizer

An ultrasonic homogenizer (UT-1200) has been used in this study to disperse the nanosilica particles in the aqueous media The silica powder was weighed, wetted by the dispersing media (i.e., water) and then dispersed using the ultrasonic homogenizer for more than 5–6 h A master suspension of fumed silica in water with a concentration up to 5 wt% was prepared initially and suspensions with lower concentration were prepared by diluting the master suspension with distilled water, either with or without the master surfactant solution

car-bonate core samples were employed in this research and characterization of the aforementioned rock samples are illustrated inTable 3

2.2 Core Displacement

This section summarizes the core flooding experiments A comprehensive series of pressure high-temperature (HPHT) core displacement experiments were carried out The experiments are done on different carbonate samples when they are water-wet They were about 10 cm long and 3.6 cm diameter

Table .Physical properties of nanoparticles.

AEROSIL R 

Reprinted with permission from Ahmadi, M A., and Shadizadeh, S R (  ) Adsorption of novel nonionic surfactant and particles

mixture in carbonates: enhanced oil recovery implication Energy and Fuels :– Copyright  American Chemical Society.

Table .Composition of reservoir oil used in this study.

Dead oil

All the core flooding experiments were performed at 100°C The core holder overburden pressure was maintained at 1500 psig and rate of injection at all tests fixed at 0.1 cc/min

3 Results and Discussion

Core displacement experiments were performed for different concentrations of hydrophobic nanosilica

Figure 2illustrates the curve of oil recovery factor versus corresponding injected pore volume via dif-ferent concentrations of hydrophobic in core displacement experiments To produce the remaining and residual oil from reservoir rock by water injection method we should reduce interfacial tension between oil and water because reducing the IFT results reducing the capillary pressure and consequently more oils can be produced Furthermore, to avoid the fingering phenomenon in water injection we should reduce the mobility ratio between injection fluid and oil and to assess this goal we should increase viscosity of the injection fluid Hydrophobic nanosilica can reduce interfacial tension between oil and water along

con-tributed in oil production during nanoflooding are IFT reduction and increasing viscosity of solution

Figure 2ashows curve of oil recovery factor (RF) versus relevant injected pore volume of brine As

depicts the variation of oil recovery factor against corresponding injected pore volume of 500 ppm of

recovery factor versus relevant nanofluid injected pore volume for 1000 ppm of hydrophobic nanosilica

an ultimate RF raised to 61.23% of OOIP One of the reasons for this fact is lowering the interfacial tension between two immiscible phases (water and oil) and then reducing the mobility ratio between nanofluid

Table .Core characterization which used in this study.

Core name Length, cm

Average diameter,

cm Area, cm  Bulk volume,

cm  PV (Sw= ), m  Porosity, %

Absolute permeability, mD

Figure .Oil recovery (%OOIP) as a function of volume injected for (a) brine flooding, (b) nanoflooding at  ppm, (c) nanoflooding at

 ppm, (d) nanoflooding at  ppm, (e) nanoflooding at  ppm, (f ) nanoflooding at  ppm, and (g) nano flooding at  ppm).

Figure .Relationship between ultimate recovery (%OOIP) and nanosilica concentration (ppm).

and oil; however, another important reason is increasing the viscosity of water phases by adding nanosil-ica to injected fluid.Figure 2ddepicts the variation of oil recovery factor versus corresponding nanofluid

changing of oil recovery factor versus relevant nanofluid injected pore volume with concentration of

1500 ppm, 3000 ppm, 6000 ppm, and 10000 ppm hydrophobic nanosilica, correspondingly It is worth

to mention that all the core flooding tests were carried out to determine the optimum concentration

of hydrophobic nanosilica Secondary hydrophobic nanoflooding for 1500 ppm, 3000 ppm, 6000 ppm, and 10000 ppm recovers 64.045%, 74.426%, 79.13%, and 80.234% OOIP, Respectively Two main factors were caused 10000 ppm of surfactant can improved recovery up to 80.234% of OOIP, first reason is low-ering IFT between two immiscible phases (water and oil) and consequently formation of microemulsion between oil and nanofluid and second reason is reduction of mobility ratio between oil and nanofluid

nanosilica concentration

4 Conclusions

The use of combination of hydrophobic nanosilica for EOR implication in a naturally fractured reservoir was systematically investigated The following deductions can be extracted based on outcomes from this work:

• Hydrophilic nanosilica can improved oil recovery up to 80.234 for 10000 ppm of nanosilica in water solution

• Recovery efficiency of nanosilica gradually increased from 6000 ppm to 10000 ppm of nanosilica

• The significant phenomenon that enhanced the oil recovery factor of nanosilica flooding is reducing the interfacial tension between injection fluid and oil and then can create high viscosity micro emul-sion This process is EOR by mean of IFT reduction However, increasing in viscosity of injected fluid and then reduce of mobility ration between oil and injected fluid is a second phenomenon for improvement of ultimate recovery and this method is EOR by mean of mobility control (mobility reduction)

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