Metallic Oxides Nanoparticles: The New Frontier in EOR

Abstract

With the rate at which most fields are becoming marginal and money is sunk to effectively recover more oil, there still lie factors that hinder oil recovery. Some of these factors are cost of recovery material, shear resistance of materials, stability of recovery materials in subsurface conditions, environmental friendliness of recovery material, ease of handling material etc. Nanoparticle EOR is a relatively new EOR technique with little or no application in the oil and gas industry. Though it is mostly still under experimentation in various labs across the world. It has proved beyond any reasonable doubt to fulfill the above stated loopholes in EOR. It also reduces interfacial tension, capillary pressure, wettability of oil, etc. with high displacement efficiency at low cost. This journal work is based on the recovery efficiency of three metallic oxides nanoparticles and their different characteristics which are very important to oil recovery. From the experimental work, it was found that aluminum oxide nanoparticles reduced interfacial tension and viscosity with a very high recovery factor, silicon oxide nanoparticles rapidly reduced wettability with a high recovery as well as magnesium oxide nanoparticle with the least. However, each of the metallic oxide particle experimented and analyzed in a core flooding system have their very peculiar property uniquely suitable for EOR at low cost and high recovery. However, the concentration of nanoparticle plays a key role in its recovery ability. The higher the concentration, the more tendencies to agglomerate and hinder permeability, the lesser the concentration, the less effective it can be. In my research, different concentrations were considered to determine the optimum concentration of metallic oxide nanoparticles with little or no adverse effect to the formation rock and fluid properties with optimum recovery.