Enhanced Recovery Research to Unlock Unconventional Hydrocarbons

Professor Anthony Kovscek

Department of Energy Resources Engineering, Stanford University

Date: November 5, 2009

Time: 4:00 p.m.

Location: MRL 2053 Materials Research Lab

Most predictions state that oil and natural gas remain important and cost-effective energy sources for the foreseeable future. As time progresses; however, engineers face increasingly more difficult to access resources including heavy (i.e., viscous) oil, the residual oil remaining after conventional recovery, and methane in impermeable coal and shale. Interestingly, enhanced recovery techniques often integrate well with efforts to reduce environmental impact. For example, waste heat from electricity production is used to generate steam for injection to reduce heavy-oil viscosity. To achieve enhanced production, fluids must flow hundreds or thousands of meters through the pore (i.e., void) space of rocks where dimensions range from 1 to 100’s of µm. Accordingly, enhanced recovery research is multiscale and multiphysics in nature due to the diversity of length scales and the interplay of transport, phase behavior, and chemistry. This talk illustrates progress in the areas of thermal recovery for fractured low permeability systems and in-situ combustion (ISC). In the former, the interplay of interfacial phenomena and pore topology determines the evolution of the wettability of rocks exposed to elevated temperature and/or aqueous solutions of variable salinity and alkalinity. In the latter, improved analytical and interpretation techniques are described to infer the properties of good versus poorly oxidizing systems. Crude oils are a mixture of many hydrocarbon components that are difficult to characterize. The combustion of these various components within rock is even more difficult to characterize. In a sense, we are developing high resolution "finger-printing" methods to establish good-burning characteristics from poor-burning characteristics. From the ISC finger prints, we also infer physics and dominant mechanisms.

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Tony Kovscek is an Associate Professor of Energy Resources Engineering at Stanford University. In collaboration with his research group, he examines the physics and chemistry of transport in porous media at length scales that vary from the pore to the laboratory the reservoir. He holds B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Chemical Engineering from the U. of Washington and U. of California at Berkeley, respectively. In 2006, he was awarded the Distinguished Achievement Award for Faculty from the Society of Petroleum Engineers.