STTR Phase I: Novel Water Flooding Technique to Enhance Oil Recovery

The broader impact/commercial potential of this STTR Phase I project is to develop a new water flood technology to increase oil recovery. The best current technology is limited to 30 - 50% recovery leaving significant resources in the ground. The available methods to further increase recovery are expensive, have limited application and can cause environmental damage. The proposed method is much lower cost and has minimal environmental impact. Our technique does not use chemicals or additives thus avoiding the risk of contaminating ground and surface water resources. Rather than drill thousands of new wells, our approach revitalizes old fields and requires little modification to the existing infrastructure and operational procedures. It would allow older fields to continue to operate, providing revenues, jobs and taxes while increasing and further diversifying our domestic oil reserves. Development of these currently unrecoverable oil resources could enable long-term stabilization of oil prices at reasonable levels and offer new business opportunities for small operators. This STTR Phase I project proposes to measure the wettability in several petroleum reservoirs and to determine the equilibrium constants required to better describe the interaction between mineral surfaces and surface-active components of crude oil. These constants will be added to a geochemical model to evaluate the capability of the models to predict wettability. Wettability in petroleum reservoirs is poorly constrained, and current formulations that depend on interfacial energy cannot accurately portray the observations and offer little predictive capability. The current wettability measurement methodologies rely on flow properties to infer interfacial energy because it is difficult to directly measure the interfacial energy between rock and oil. Using a geochemical approach, we can explicitly represent the electrostatic and van der Waals force that make up the interfacial energy. This approach will produce quantitative formulations of wettability that can be implemented in standard geochemical models. Our goals are to demonstrate that we can measure the important reactions using standard chemical methodologies, that these measurements can be used in geochemical models to calculate wettability and that the models can be used to predict wettability as a function of water chemistry, for enabling techniques for more effective water flooding and enhanced oil recovery.