October 2023: Enhanced Oil Recovery from Fractured Carbonate Reservoirs Using Nanoparticles w/ Low…
Channel: Texas CSEE
Date: 2023-10-11

ABSTRACT:
The global importance of oil production in the face of increasing demand for energy and its resources cannot be overstated. In addition to traditional brine imbibition into porous matrix domains aimed at displacing substantial amounts of oil towards production wells for maximum oil recovery, eco-friendly and effective oil recovery techniques have been diversely employed. Carbonate reservoirs, which contain more than half of the global oil reserves, are characterized by heterogeneities, natural fracture networks, and wettability, culminating in waterflooding inefficiency. Consequently, the performance of low salinity water (LSW), nanoparticles (NPs), and surfactants (abbreviated as LNS) in their individual and combined applications for enhanced oil recovery (EOR) purposes has been proposed and recently highlighted in several works.
This presentation will discuss the crude oil-brine-rock (COBR) interactions, the interfacial science concepts, and the previous performances of LNS, which are used to effectively design suitable coreflooding experiments for examining the overall performance of LNS in FCRs.

BIO: 
Gideon Dordzie is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Center for Subsurface Energy and The Environment at The University of Texas at Austin. He holds a B.S. degree in Petroleum Engineering from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Ghana and a Ph.D. degree from the University of Wyoming. Dr. Dordzie’s research areas include Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR), nanotechnology, surface and interfacial science, experimental process design, and optimization. He was the 1st Place Recipient of the 2022 Harry Hill Graduate Excellence Award in the Department of Energy and Petroleum Engineering at the University of Wyoming for demonstrating outstanding performance in teaching, research, presentations, and publication efforts. Dr. Dordzie has published several articles in prestigious journals and tutored as a temporary lecturer at the University of Wyoming.