Understanding Penetration Behavior of Microemulsions Into Shale Nanopores
- Authors
- Khoa Bui (Texas A&M University) | I. Yucel Akkutlu (Texas A&M University) | Andrei S. Zelenev (Flotek Chemistry) | James Silas (Flotek Chemistry)
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.2118/185787-MS
- Document ID
- SPE-185787-MS
- Publisher
- Society of Petroleum Engineers
- Source
- SPE Europec featured at 79th EAGE Conference and Exhibition, 12-15 June, Paris, France
- Publication Date
- 2017
- Document Type
- Conference Paper
- Language
- English
- ISBN
- 978-1-61399-539-6
- Copyright
- 2017. Society of Petroleum Engineers
- Disciplines
- 1.6.9 Coring, Fishing, 2.4 Hydraulic Fracturing, 2.5.2 Fracturing Materials (Fluids, Proppant), 5.1.1 Exploration, Development, Structural Geology, 1.6 Drilling Operations, 5.1 Reservoir Characterisation, 2 Well completion, 3 Production and Well Operations, 5 Reservoir Desciption & Dynamics, 5.5 Reservoir Simulation
- Keywords
- shale, penetration, nanopores, EOR, microemulsion
- Downloads
- 6 in the last 30 days
- 188 since 2007
- Show more detail
- View rights & permissions
| SPE Member Price: | USD 8.50 |
| SPE Non-Member Price: | USD 25.00 |
Resource shales have low permeability matrix with nanoporous features. At nano scale in situ fluids experience strong fluid-wall interactions and confinement effects. The hydrocarbons recovery from the nanopore network is therefore limited. Microemulsions are known to be effective in stimulating oil and gas production from non-conventional reservoirs, however their mechanisms of action, as well as their ability to penetrate into nanosize pores of shale matrix during an operation such as hydraulic fracturing needs to be investigated. In this paper, we investigate the conditions for the microemulsion droplet penetration into model nanopores, identify the penetration mechanisms and, following their penetration, analyze their interactions with model organic and inorganic walls, and study their behavior in confinement.
Molecular dynamics simulation is employed to simulate the behavior of a nanodroplet dispersion facing a solid surface. The model nanodroplets comprise swollen micelles of C12E7 nonionic surfactant with the d-limonene solvent solubilized in their cores. An oil-wet solid surface is modeled using graphite to represent hydrophobic kerogen in shale, and a water-wet solid surface is modeled using brucite to represent hydrophilic inorganic materials in shale. These surfaces are considered to have nanocapillaries with varying sizes, available for the microemulsion penetration experiment. Our results indicate that penetration into capillaries with sizes less than 10 nm is strongly influenced by the wettability of the solid surface. In the case of an oil-wet solid surface the droplets adsorb on the surfaces and hence impact the penetration ability. In the case of a water-wet surface, however, microemulsion droplets effectively penetrate into the nanocapillaries. The droplets are capable of penetrating into the capillaries that are smaller than their own size. In both of these two cases, the solubilized solvent and the surfactant are delivered into a tight nanocapillary network and come into contact with the in situ hydrocarbons. This research can be extended to include ionic surfactants, varying salinity, and more complex solid surfaces to develop the next generation microemulsions with superior performance in enhancing oil production from the unconventional reservoirs.
| File Size | 2 MB | Number of Pages | 12 |
Berendsen, H. J. C., J. R. Grigera, T. P. Straatsma. 1987. The missing term in effective pair potentials (in The Journal of Physical Chemistry 91 (24): 6269-6271. http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/j100308a038.
Binazadeh, Mojtaba, Mingxiang Xu, Ashkan Zolfaghari. 2016. Effect of Electrostatic Interactions on Water Uptake of Gas Shales: The Interplay of Solution Ionic Strength and Electrostatic Double Layer (in Energy & Fuels 30 (2): 992-1001. http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/acs.energyfuels.5b02990.
Bui, Khoa, I. Yucel Akkutlu. 2015. Nanopore wall effect on surface tension of methane (in Molecular Physics 113 (22): 3506-3513. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00268976.2015.1037369.
Hess, Berk, Carsten Kutzner, David van der Spoel. 2008. GROMACS 4: Algorithms for Highly Efficient, Load-Balanced, and Scalable Molecular Simulation (in Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation 4 (3): 435-447. http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/ct700301q.
Humphrey, William, Andrew Dalke, Klaus Schulten. 1996. VMD: Visual molecular dynamics (in Journal of Molecular Graphics 14 (1): 33-38. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0263785596000185.
Jorgensen, William L., David S. Maxwell, Julian Tirado-Rives. 1996. Development and Testing of the OPLS All-Atom Force Field on Conformational Energetics and Properties of Organic Liquids (in Journal of the American Chemical Society 118 (45): 11225-11236. http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/ja9621760.
Jorgensen, William L., Julian Tirado-Rives. 1988. The OPLS [optimized potentials for liquid simulations] potential functions for proteins, energy minimizations for crystals of cyclic peptides and crambin (in Journal of the American Chemical Society 110 (6): 1657-1666. http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/ja00214a001.
Kobayashi, Kazuya, Yunfeng Liang, Ken-ichi Amano. 2016. Molecular Dynamics Simulation of Atomic Force Microscopy at the Water–Muscovite Interface: Hydration Layer Structure and Force Analysis (in Langmuir 32 (15): 3608-3616. http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/acs.langmuir.5b04277.
Levine, Benjamin G., David N. LeBard, Russell DeVane. 2011. Micellization Studied by GPU-Accelerated Coarse-Grained Molecular Dynamics (in Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation 7 (12): 4135-4145. http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/ct2005193.
Tummala, Naga Rajesh, Liu Shi, Alberto Striolo. 2011. Molecular dynamics simulations of surfactants at the silica–water interface: Anionic vs nonionic headgroups (in Journal of Colloid and Interface Science 362 (1): 135-143. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0021979711007508.
Van Der Spoel, David, Erik Lindahl, Berk Hess. 2005. GROMACS: Fast, flexible, and free (in Journal of Computational Chemistry 26 (16): 1701-1718. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/jcc.20291.
Vo, Truong Quoc, Murat Barisik, BoHung Kim. 2015. Near-surface viscosity effects on capillary rise of water in nanotubes (in Physical Review E 92 (5): 053009. http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevE.92.053009.
Washburn, Edward W. 1921. The Dynamics of Capillary Flow (in Physical Review 17 (3): 273-283. http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRev.17.273.
Zelenev, Andrei S.,. Champagne, Lakia M., Hamilton, Michael. 2011. Investigation of interactions of diluted microemulsions with shale rock and sand by adsorption and wettability measurements (in Colloids and Surfaces A: Physicochemical and Engineering Aspects 391 (1–3): 201-207. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0927775711004419.
