Application of Nanoparticles in Enhanced Oil Recovery: A Critical Review of Recent Progress
By Xiaofei Sun, Yanyu Zhang, Guangpeng Chen, Zhi-yong Gai. 2017
498 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The injected fluids in secondary processes supplement the natural energy present in the reservoir to displace oil. The recovery efficiency mainly depends on the mechanism of pressure maintenance. However, the injected fluids in tertiary or enhanced oil recovery (EOR) processes interact with the reservoir rock/oil system. Thus, EOR techniques are receiving substantial attention worldwide as the available oil resources are declining. However, some challenges, such as low sweep efficiency, high costs and potential formation damage, still hinder the further application of these EOR technologies. Current studies on nanoparticles are seen as potential solutions to most of the challenges associated with these traditional EOR techniques. This paper provides an overview of the latest studies about the use of nanoparticles to enhance oil recovery and paves the way for researchers who are interested in the integration of these progresses. The first part of this paper addresses studies about the major EOR mechanisms of nanoparticles used in the forms of nanofluids, nanoemulsions and nanocatalysts, including disjoining pressure, viscosity increase of injection fluids, preventing asphaltene precipitation, wettability alteration and interfacial tension reduction. This part is followed by a review of the most important research regarding various novel nano-assisted EOR methods where nanoparticles are used to target various existing thermal, chemical and gas methods. Finally, this review identifies the challenges and opportunities for future study regarding application of nanoparticles in EOR processes.
Subfields: Analytical Chemistry, Mechanics of Materials, Ocean Engineering
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fcdeb28da22244d9e7cdb6110396bac85a2bb647
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In Analytical Chemistry
In Ocean Engineering
Citations in the corpus
- An overview of chemical enhanced oil recovery: recent advances and prospects (2019, unknown): “Hence, they have been deemed more suitable and tagged as the next revolution for the application of chemical EOR methods [14, 108, 109].”
- The effect of nanoparticles on reservoir wettability alteration: a critical review (2020, background): “Furthermore, adding small quantities of chemical additives is beneficial and economically visible in the oil industry; however, higher concentration of nanoparticles (more than 3 wt%) may lead to a reduction in reservoir permeability (Bhuiyan et al. 2015; Sun et al. 2017).”