Date of Graduation

2014

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Type

MS

College

Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources

Department

Petroleum and Natural Gas Engineering

Committee Chair

Khashayar Aminian

Committee Co-Chair

Samuel Ameri

Committee Member

Khashayar Aminian

Committee Member

Daniel E Della-Giustina

Abstract

In conventional oil reservoirs after drilling a well, the hydrocarbon starts to produce by the natural force of the reservoir. After a period of production the reservoir energy declines and the secondary recovery methods are used to keep the production rate constant. The most common secondary method is water flooding in which by injecting water into the reservoir, trapped oil is pushed toward the producing wells. Water flooding is not a long term method for producing oil and as soon as the water finds its path to the producers, water cut goes up and injection is not economical anymore. Therefore tertiary methods or EOR methods are introduced. In these methods by injecting special kind of fluid, rock and/or fluid properties are changed and another portion of trapped oil can be produced. Nano particles are one of the popular new EOR agents that can attract petroleum engineers' attention in recent years. In this work, two types of nano particles were used for studying the effect of nano particles on additional oil recovery. In the first step different concentration of nano fluids were prepared and the effect of each concentration on IFT and wettability angle was determined. After specifying the optimum concentration of nano fluid for each two types of nano particles, two sand stone samples were first flooded by four pore volume of brine and then with three pore volume of nano fluid and the volume of produced oil for calculating the recovery factor was recorded. The results show hydrophobic and neutral wet nano particles can bring in additional recovery factor of 23.8% and 29.9% in sandstone core samples respectively. This improvement in sandstone samples can be recognized due to interfacial tension reduction and wettability alteration.

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