SBIR-STTR Award

The broader impact/commercial potential of this STTR Phase I project is to develop a new water flood technology to increase oil recovery. The best current technology is limited to 30 - 50% recovery leaving significant resources in the ground. The available methods to further increase recovery are expensive, have limited application and can cause environmental damage. The proposed method is much lower cost and has minimal environmental impact. Our technique does not use chemicals or additives thus avoiding the risk of contaminating ground and surface water resources. Rather than drill thousands of new wells, our approach revitalizes old fields and requires little modification to the existing infrastructure and operational procedures. It would allow older fields to continue to operate, providing revenues, jobs and taxes while increasing and further diversifying our domestic oil reserves. Development of these currently unrecoverable oil resources could enable long-term stabilization of oil prices at reasonable levels and offer new business opportunities for small operators. This STTR Phase I project proposes to measure the wettability in several petroleum reservoirs and to determine the equilibrium constants required to better describe the interaction between mineral surfaces and surface-active components of crude oil. These constants will be added to a geochemical model to evaluate the capability of the models to predict wettability. Wettability in petroleum reservoirs is poorly constrained, and current formulations that depend on interfacial energy cannot accurately portray the observations and offer little predictive capability. The current wettability measurement methodologies rely on flow properties to infer interfacial energy because it is difficult to directly measure the interfacial energy between rock and oil. Using a geochemical approach, we can explicitly represent the electrostatic and van der Waals force that make up the interfacial energy. This approach will produce quantitative formulations of wettability that can be implemented in standard geochemical models. Our goals are to demonstrate that we can measure the important reactions using standard chemical methodologies, that these measurements can be used in geochemical models to calculate wettability and that the models can be used to predict wettability as a function of water chemistry, for enabling techniques for more effective water flooding and enhanced oil recovery.

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) project is to deploy a revolutionary water-flood technology to increase oil recovery. The best current technology is limited to 30 - 50% recovery leaving significant resources in the ground. The available methods to further increase recovery are expensive, have limited application and can cause environmental damage. The proposed method is much less expensive and has minimal environmental impact. Our technique does not use chemicals or additives thus avoiding the risk of contaminating ground and surface water resources. Rather than drill thousands of new wells, our approach revitalizes old fields and requires little modification to the existing infrastructure and operational procedures. It would allow older fields to continue to operate, providing jobs and taxes while increasing and further diversifying our domestic oil reserves. Full success of enhanced oil recovery,could produce up to 21.7 billion barrels of additional oil generating over $1 trillion for the US oil industry over the next twenty-five years, thereby increasing the energy security of the U.S. and creating more jobs while stabilizing domestic oil production at much lower costs than other technologies. This SBIR Phase II project proposes to validate the technology to optimize wettability in existing oil reservoirs through flotation experiments, computer modeling and field pilots. Once we have achieved good pH control during the flotation experiments, we will determine the impact on reservoir wettability, the effect of salinity on wettability and the equilibrium constants for the surface complexation computer model. Finally, we will conduct concept validation projects in field to verify a minimum of 5% OOIP increase in oil production. Thus, we will provide producers with a field-verified process operators can implement to yield significant results for little cost. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.