Abstract
Globally, a small percentage of oil is recovered from reservoirs using primary and secondary recovery mechanisms, and thus a major focus of the oil industry is toward developing new technologies to increase recovery. Many new technologies utilize surfactants, macromolecules, and even nanoparticles, which are difficult to deploy in harsh reservoir conditions and where failures cause material aggregation and sticking to rock surfaces. To combat these issues, typically material properties are adjusted, but recent studies show that adjusting the dispersing fluid chemistry could have significant impact on material survivability. Herein, the effect of injection fluid salinity and composition on nanomaterial fate is explored using atomic force microscopy (AFM). The results show that the calcium content in reservoir fluids affects the interactions of an AFM tip with a calcite surface, as surrogates for nanomaterials interacting with carbonate reservoir rock. The extreme force sensitivity of AFM provides the ability to elucidate small differences in adhesion at the pico-Newton (pN) level and provides direct information about material survivability. Increasing the calcium content mitigates adhesion at the pN-scale, a possible means to increase nanomaterial survivability in oil reservoirs or to control nanomaterial fate in other aqueous environments.
Highlights
The ability to produce oil more effectively directly affects the supply of oil worldwide and, as a result, impacts oil prices and the cost of goods and services at a global scale[1,2,3,4,5]
There is significant interest in developing new technologies to improve oil recovery through the use of chemicals and nano-additives in the later stages of production. At this stage of production, these materials are injected with high salinity water to track flood fronts, determine subsurface flow pathways, or interact with residual oil in the subsurface, which is important to improve reservoir management and increase oil recovery[4, 6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25]
When studying nanoparticles for reservoir applications, where these materials are used to improve the understanding of subsurface flow pathways or act to mobilize residual oil, material instabilities are evident through nanoparticle-nanoparticle and nanoparticle-surface interactions, which leads to both homo- and hetero-aggregation[9, 13, 17,18,19, 27, 28]
Summary
The ability to produce oil more effectively directly affects the supply of oil worldwide and, as a result, impacts oil prices and the cost of goods and services at a global scale[1,2,3,4,5]. In addition to sample topography, AFM is an extremely sensitive tool to measure tip-surface interactions in both air and fluid environments[54, 57,58,59,60,61,62,63].
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