Enhanced oil recovery: Definitions, fundamentals, applications, and research frontiers

Benchmarking methods of enhanced heavy oil recovery using a microscaled bead-pack

“…However, injecting and producing high volumes of water to recover small volumes of oil is usually not technically practical or economically feasible. 1,2,4 The amount of water co-produced with oil is represented by a parameter called the fractional water cut (f wc ), the volume fraction of water phase produced as a fraction of other produced fluids. When seeking to exploit a petroleum deposit the key parameters are the amount of oil that will be recovered as a function of the water cut or rate of water production.…”

“…Thus both thermal and chemical methods to enhance the recovery of heavy oil have been developed, although at the present time it is thermal methods that dominate as the enhanced oil recovery method of choice for heavy oil fields. 4,5 Thermal methods of enhanced oil recovery primarily depend on the faster decrease in heavy oil's viscosity, with increasing temperature, when compared with the corresponding reduction in water's viscosity. 4 Chemical methods of enhanced oil recovery utilise the formation of emulsions (notably water in oil) with a lower viscosity than the original oil phase.…”

“…4,5 Thermal methods of enhanced oil recovery primarily depend on the faster decrease in heavy oil's viscosity, with increasing temperature, when compared with the corresponding reduction in water's viscosity. 4 Chemical methods of enhanced oil recovery utilise the formation of emulsions (notably water in oil) with a lower viscosity than the original oil phase. This alters the interfacial tension of the oil/water/ rock system, so that oil is less preferentially held by the host geological formation.…”

“…Such evaluation is often performed using a gravel/bead-pack or sample of rock (a geological core) representative of the geological formations in the oil reservoir. 4,6,7 In these experiments, heavy oil is displaced from the bead-pack or core material, and the data are used to evaluate the feasibility of the particular recovery technique at the field scale. The economic cost of performing these tests is small in comparison to the cost of implementing a field-scale enhanced oil recovery, but nonetheless is still considerable.…”

Star-Like Branched Polyacrylamides by RAFT polymerization, Part II: Performance Evaluation in Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR)

“…Conventional oil extraction techniques, consisting of primary and secondary techniques recover at most ∼55% (typically between 20–40% 1 ) of the original oil in place (OOIP). 2 In fact, an enormously large quantity (7.0 × 10 12 barrels) of the OOIP remains embedded in mature oil fields. 3 After exhaustion of conventional techniques, a tertiary method, known as enhanced oil recovery (EOR) is applied to target the remaining ∼45% of OOIP.…”