EOR technologies such as CO 2 flooding, chemical floods and WAG have been on the forefront of oil and gas R&D for the past 4 decades. While most of them are demonstrating very promising results in both lab scale and field pilots, the thrive for exploring additional EOR technologies while achieving full field application has yet to be achieved. Nano EOR is among the new frontiers that demand more improvements, therefore, new concepts and extensive innovative experimental procedures are required to identify and address key associated uncertainties.The procedure proposed in this report includes an understanding of the Nano-EOR physical processes on lab-scale models of carbonate reservoir retrieved core plugs. (Ogolo et al., 2010). The main objectives include reducing the HSE concerns of handling and transporting the nano particles as well as targeting the unswept oil.Carbonate core-plugs from Abu Dhabi producing oilfields with porosity ranging from 10 to 24% and permeability ranging from 77 to 149 mD were tested. Several nano particles including Fe (III) O, CuO and NiO of 50 nm range were tested after the waterflooding stage and compared for ultimate recovery factors. The nano EOR was also compared on the same cores subjected to the same conditions against chemical EOR and Electrically Enhanced Oil Recovery (EEOR). A Smart Nano-EOR process is proposed in this study that allows shifting from simultaneous to sequential Nano-EOR alongside EK.The results obtained on our tested cores reveal that the waterflooding recovery factor ranged from 48 to 63% based on the rock properties, whereas Smart Nano-EOR revealed an ultimate recovery factor of 57 to 85% respectively. The Smart Nano-EOR process is fine tuned to reach the ultimate recovery factor when the specific mechanism is optimized based on both rock and fluid properties. Uncovering physical process enablers will be discussed in this paper to further understand the mechanisms involved in Smart-Nano-EOR.

EOR technologies such as CO2 flooding and chemical floods have been on the forefront of oil and gas R&D for the past 4 decades. While most of them are demonstrating very promising results in both lab scale and field pilots, the thrive for exploring additional EOR technologies while achieving full field application has yet to be achieved. Among the emerging EOR technologies is the surfactant EOR along with the application of electrically enhanced oil recovery (EEOR) which is gaining increased popularity due to a number of reservoir-related advantages such as reduction in fluid viscosity, water-cut and increased reservoir permeability. Experiments were conducted on 1.5" carbonate reservoir cores extracted from Abu Dhabi producing oil fields, which were saturated with medium crude oil in a specially designed EK core flood setup. Electrokinetics (DC voltage of 2V/cm) was applied on these oil saturated cores along with waterflooding simultaneously until the ultimate recovery was reached. In the second stage, the recovery was further enhanced by injecting non-ionic surfactant (APG) along with sequential application of EK. This was compared with simultaneous application of EK-assisted surfactant flooding. A smart Surfactant-EOR process was done in this study that allowed shifting from sequential to simultaneous Surfactant-EOR alongside EEOR The experimental results at ambient conditions show that the application of waterflooding on the carbonate cores yields recovery of approximately 46–72% and an additional 8–14% incremental recovery resulted upon application of EK, which could be promising for water swept reservoirs. However, there was an additional 6–11% recovery enhanced by the application of EK-assisted surfactant flooding. In addition, EK was shown to enhance the carbonate reservoir’s permeability by approximately 11–29%. Furthermore, this process can be engineered to be a greener approach as the water requirement can be reduced upto 20% in the presence of electrokinetics which is also economically feasible.