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Abstract

Summary

Carbone dioxide injection is one of the most frequently used enhanced oil recovery methods. However, injection of CO2 in heavy oil reservoirs with high percentage of asphaltene usually results in asphaltene precipitation in porous media that causes many problems, including reduction in the oil production. One possible method to reduce asphaltene precipitation is the injection of nano-fluids into the oil reservoirs. Carbone dioxide gas that is saturated with nanoparticles can be used to control asphaltene precipitation issue. In this study, vanishing interfacial tension technique was used to investigate the possibility of diminishing asphaltene precipitation by nano-particles. The results of this study shows that in solutions containing asphaltene, an increase in pressure causes the interfacial tension between oil and CO2 gas to decrease linearly with two different slopes at low and high pressure ranges. Nevertheless, addition of iron oxide nanoparticles to the oil solution can reduce the interfacial tension at higher pressures and control asphaltene precipitation. Moreover, it was found that the onset of asphaltene precipitation could be predicted by plotting the Bond number versus pressure.

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/content/papers/10.3997/2214-4609.201701351
2017-06-12
2024-03-28
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