Enhanced Oil Recovery Techniques

Enhanced oil recovery (EOR) refers to a set of engineering methods used to extract crude oil that conventional drilling and pressure-driven production leave behind in reservoir rock — often more than half of a reservoir's original content. Researchers use X-ray computed tomography to image pore-scale fluid behavior directly inside rock samples, pairing those observations with computational models to understand how oil, water, and injected agents interact at the microscopic level. Much of the current work centers on how surfactants, nanofluids, and foams alter the wettability of rock surfaces — the tendency of a surface to attract oil or water — since shifting that balance can mobilize trapped oil that would otherwise remain immobile. Open questions include how nanofluid behavior scales from laboratory cores to full reservoirs, and whether wettability alteration effects persist reliably across the range of temperature, salinity, and mineral compositions found in real offshore and deep subsea formations.

Works

68,726

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956,557

Keywords

X-ray Computed TomographyPore-scale ModelingEnhanced Oil RecoveryWettability AlterationNanofluidsSurfactants