Basilio, E., Babadagli, T., 2020. Use of air with methane in cyclic solvent injection applications for improved foam stability and cost effective heavy oil recovery. Energy &Fuels 34, 278-293.

https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.energyfuels.9b03677 Foamy oil flow is commonly encountered in heavy oil production from homogeneous or heterogeneous (after cold heavy oil production with sands - CHOPS) reservoirs. This can be due to a drive mechanism in the primary production (depletion of methane saturated heavy-oil) and secondary stage (gas injection after primary production). In the primary stage, among other important parameters, the pressure depletion rate has been reported to be the most critical characteristic to control this type of flow. In the secondary stage, gas amount and type (sole injection of methane, carbon dioxide, propane, or a combination of these), and application conditions (soaking time on cyclic solvent injection (CSI) durations, depletion rate) are critical. The cornerstone of the foamy oil behavior during CSI relies on its stability, of which depends on parameters such as oil viscosity, temperature, dissolved gas ratio, pressure decline rate, and dissolved gas (solvent) composition. Although the process has been investigated and analyzed for different parameters in the literature, the optimal conditions for an effective and more economical process (mainly foamy oil stability) has not been thoroughly understood, especially for secondary recovery conditions. In this study, air has been used as an ameliorative to improve foamy oil stability during CSI. Four pressure depletion tests were performed, each of them consisting of five consecutive cycles. Each pressure depletion test included eight independent pressure recordings obtained from pressure transducers distributed along a sandpack holder for 48 hours. In order to reach the optimal conditions of the applications, three different pressure depletion rates were tested at 0.23 psi, 0.51 psi/min, 1.53 psi/min, together with air as an ameliorative for foamy oil stability. We observed that increasing pressure depletion rates increased the formation of foamy oil, however, when pressure depletion rates were too high, it may have caused a negative effect in the final oil recovery factor by CSI. Injecting air into the sandpack caused an increase in the viscosity of heavy oil, and the subsequent injection of methane as a solvent became more effective in generating more stable foamy oil, which resulted in obtaining a higher oil recovery factor.

Bastviken, D., Nygren, J., Schenk, J., Parellada Massana, R., Duc, N.T., 2020. Technical note: Facilitating the use of low-cost methane (CH ) sensors in flux chambers - calibration, data processing, and an open source make-it- 4 yourself logger. Biogeosciences Discussions 2020, 1-16.

https://www.biogeosciences-discuss.net/bg-2019-499/ A major bottleneck regarding the efforts to better quantify greenhouse gas fluxes, map sources and sinks, and understand flux regulation, is the shortage of low-cost and accurate-enough measurement methods. The studies of methane (CH ) - a long-lived greenhouse gas increasing rapidly but irregularly in the atmosphere for unclear 4 reasons, and with poorly understood source-sink attribution - suffer from such method limitations. This study present new calibration and data processing approaches for use of a low-cost CH sensor in flux chambers. 4 Results show that the change in relative CH levels can be determined at rather high accuracy in the 2 -700 ppm 4 range, with modest efforts of collecting reference samples in situ, and without continuous access to expensive reference instruments. These results open for more affordable and time-effective measurements of CH in flux 4 chambers. To facilitate such measurements, we also provide a description for building and using an Arduino logger for CH , carbon dioxide (CO ), humidity, and temperature. 4 2

Baú, J.P.T., Villafañe-Barajas, S.A., da Costa, A.C.S., Negrón-Mendoza, A., Colín-Garcia, M., Zaia, D.A.M., 2019. Adenine adsorbed onto montmorillonite exposed to ionizing radiation: Essays on prebiotic chemistry. Astrobiology 20, 26-38.

https://doi.org/10.1089/ast.2018.1909 Most adsorption and radiolysis experiments related to prebiotic chemistry studies are performed in distilled water or sodium chloride solutions. However, distilled water and sodium chloride solutions do not represent the 2+ 2+ composition of the primitive seas of Earth. In this work, an artificial seawater with ion abundances Mg > Ca + + 2- - >> Na ≈ K and SO >> Cl was used, one that is different from the average composition of seawater today. 4 This artificial seawater is named seawater 4.0 Ga, since it better represents the composition of the major