INVESTIGATING ZnO NANOPARTICLES EFFECT ON THE STEAM-ASSISTED GRAVITY DRAINAGE (SAGD) PROCESS IN A HEAVY-OIL RESERVOIR

摘要

Currently, due to the oil price and unpredictable economical conditions, the turning of heavy resources into reserves is one of the important challenging issues. So, considering an efficient method of unlocking barrels of oil that otherwise would have been inaccessible is recently the most substantial subject. Among different processes, steam-assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) is an effective thermal method for producing heavy oil. In otherwise, nanoparticles are defined as surface active agents that penetrate into porous media and, by creating homogeneous area, cause the viscosity to decrease and the thermal capacity to increase. It seems that a combination of thermal process and nanoparticles has an effective influence on the EOR methods. This paper introduces a new idea of adding ZnO nanoparticles by experimental work for oil recovery through the SAGD process. The main goal was to prove that ZnO nanoparticles had the ability to improve oil recovery. Laboratory tests were conducted in two experiments through the use of a two-dimensional scaled SAGD cell with porous packing materials on an Iranian heavy oil reservoir. In the first experiment, the SAGD cell was saturated with heavy oil and in the second one, ZnO nanoparticles flooding into cell and then saturated with crude oil for about 24 h and the amount of recovery was monitored during 12 h for both tests. Oil recovery was 45% without nanoparticles and 83.45% with nanoparticles at the 720th min. These results showed that ZnO nanoparticles had a remarkable effect on decreasing oil viscosity and increasing recovery.