Enhancing Oil Recovery of Low-Permeability Berea Sandstone through Optimized Nanofluids Concentration

Abstract

Abstract Current global demand for fossil fuel such as oil is still high. This encourages oil and gas industries to improve their effort of finding new discoveries, developing technique and maximizing recovery of their current resources including in low-permeability reservoir. Enhanced oil recovery (EOR) is a technique to enhanced ultimate recovery. Since technology has been continuously developed such as nanotechnology/nano-size material, EOR methods have improved. One of them is Nano-EOR that triggered great attention in last decade. Nanoparticles may alter the reservoir fluid composition and rock-fluid properties to assist in mobilizing trapped oil. Most of observation from lab-scale reported that it seems potentially interesting for EOR. Since reservoir management is very essential for the success of all improved/enhanced oil recovery (IOR/EOR) methods, optimizing nanofluids concentration is a proposed reservoir management to maximize oil recovery using Nano-EOR in this paper. Low-permeability water-wet Berea sandstones core-plugs with porosity ranged 13-15% and permeability ranged 5-20 mD were tested. A hydrophilic silica nanoparticles with primary particle size 7 nm was employed without surface treatment. Nanofluids with various concentration ranged 0.01 - 0.1 wt.% were synthesized with synthetic saline water for optimizing study. The wettability alteration due to nanofluids was observed; coreflood experiment was conducted and compared its displacement efficiency. The results observed a range of nanofluids concentration that could maximize oil recovery in low-permeability water-wet Berea sandstone. Although contact angle of aqueous phase decreases as nanofluids concentration increase which means easier of oil to be released but we observed that higher concentration (e.g. 0.1 wt.%) has a tendency to block pore network and will decrease or even without additional oil recovery. This study provides if concentration of nanofluids has an important parameter in Nano-EOR and could be optimized to maximize oil recovery of low-permeability water-wet Berea sandstone.