Introduction to Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) Processes and Bioremediation of Oil-Contaminated Sites

Abstract

Her research interests include optimization of EOR chemical flooding, evaluation of the mechanisms of polymer gels as conformance-improvement agents, heavy oil recovery, and bitumen upgrading. Romero-Zerón has published several scientific papers and is the co-author of a book in the area of reservoir conformance-improvement. She is a SPE member and holds the SPE Petroleum Engineering Certification. ContentsPreface XI Section Introduction to Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) 1 Chapter Advances in Enhanced Oil Recovery Processes 3 Laura Romero-Zerón Chapter The Application of a New Polymeric Surfactant for Chemical EOR 45 Khaled Abdalla Elraies and Isa M. Tan Chapter Microbial Enhanced Oil Recovery 71 Hamid Rashedi, Fatemeh Yazdian and Simin Naghizadeh Chapter Enhanced Oil Recovery in Fractured Reservoirs 89 Martin A. Fernø Section Environmental Management Through Bioremediation 111 Chapter Microorganisms and Crude Oil 113 Dorota Wolicka and Andrzej Borkowski Chapter Comprehensive Perspectives in Bioremediation of Crude Oil Contaminated Environments 143

Exploiting Microbes in the Petroleum Field: Analyzing the Credibility of Microbial Enhanced Oil Recovery (MEOR)

“…In this situation, a maximum quantity of oil is displaced under a specifically maintained gradient of pressure. At subsequent stages, when the quantity of oil relative to the water increases, it is no longer economical to continue the process, and the oil reserve should be abandoned [18,20,21]. Around 50% to 70% of the world's unrecoverable crude oil remains in reserves that have been exhausted by conventional methods [22][23][24].…”

“…The wettability alteration, permeability and porosity alteration, IFT relaxation between oil and water in porous media, and microbial clogging mechanism increase production of incremental oil and its sweep efficiency [134]. Three-dimensional modelling, including these parameters and additional assumptions, has helped in simulating a model for a hypothetical reservoir with the provided experimental data [21,53,134,150,153,155,156].…”

Chemical enhanced oil recovery and the role of chemical product design

“…A detailed description of other EOR techniques and nanotechnology is outside the scope of this review. The interested reader is kindly referred to existing literature on the topic [23,29,[52][53][54][55][56][57][58][59][60][61][62][63][64][65][66]. (adapted from BP [3,21]).…”

“…ASP flooding consists in injecting, before the surfactant and polymer slugs, alkaline or caustic solutions into the reservoir. Common chemicals used as alkaline injection products are sodium hydroxide, sodium metaborate, sodium silicate, or sodium bi/carbonate [59,450]. However, Berger [451], Gong [452], Zhao [453], and Bataweel [454,455] reported also the use of organic alkalis as a medium to improve the more traditional inorganic ones (Fig.…”

“…where HA is an acid-like compound and − A is the soap component. Moreover, when an alkali is added with a surfactant like in an ASP process, the alkali will reduce the adsorption of surfactant on the grain surfaces through the formation and sequestering of divalents ions [59]. Alkali is also added to the water in order to control the local salinity to ensure minimum IFT and it can also alter the rock wettability [308,[490][491][492].…”