Oil recovery by waterflooding in fractured formations is often dependent on spontaneous imbibition. However, spontaneous imbibition is often insignificant in oil-wet, carbonate rocks. Sodium carbonate and anionic surfactant solutions are evaluated for enhancing oil recovery by spontaneous imbibition from oil-wet carbonate rocks. Crude-oil samples must be free of surface-active contaminants to b...

Injection of optimized chemistry water in enhanced oil recovery (EOR) has gained much interest in the past few years. Crude oil-water interfaces can have a viscoelastic character affected by the adsorption of amphiphilic molecules. The brine concentration as well as surfactants may strongly affect the fluid-fluid interfacial viscoelasticity. In this work we investigate interfacial viscoelastici...

The recent development of tight oil reservoirs has led to an increase in oil production in the past several years due to the progress in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing. However, the expected oil recovery factor from these reservoirs is still very low. CO2-based enhanced oil recovery is a suitable solution to improve the recovery. One challenge of the estimation of the recovery is ...

A significant quantum of crude oil is trapped in reservoirs and often unrecoverable by conventional oil recovery methods. Further downstream, the petroleum industry is facing challenges to remove sulfur, metal, nitrogen as well as undesirable organic compounds from the crude. Conventional secondary recovery methods such as water and gas injections helped to increase the productivity of the well...

Measurement of thermal conductivity of rocks is important to understand the thermal properties of earth materials, the characteristics of terrestrial heat flow, and the formation of oil. In this paper we report thermal conductivity, thermal diffusivity, and heat capacity data for 12 conglomerate, sandstone, and gypsum-bearing samples from the Paleogene Kuqa River profile in Kuqa, China. Samples...

Crude oil is the major source of energy worldwide being exploited as a source of economy, including Oman. As the price of crude oil increases and crude oil reserves collapse, exploitation of oil resources in mature reservoirs is essential for meeting future energy demands. As conventional recovery methods currently used have become less efficient for the needs, there is a continuous demand of d...

Phase selective gelation (PSG) of organic phases from their non-miscible mixtures with water was achieved using tetrapeptides bearing a side-chain azobenzene moiety. The presence of the chromophore allowed PSG at the same concentration as the minimum gelation concentration (MGC) necessary to obtain the gels in pure organic phases. Remarkably, the presence of the water phase during PSG did not i...

A typical Iranian carbonate matrix block surrounded by an open fracture was modeled in order to understand the fracture-matrix interaction and realize how to model the interaction best. The modeling was carried out by using a fine-scaled Eclipse model in the single porosity mode (the fractures were explicitly modeled). The model was extended to a stack of 6 matrix blocks to understand block-to-...

Few people would deny that the world runs on oil. Oil, regarded as the blood of industry, may cause economic crises, and even lead to conflicts and wars. Three applicable models and several feasible policies are presented to settle the problem. We devise the Irreversible Depletion Model, and use global statistics data in logistic regressions to predict the total ultimate oil recovery. Relying o...