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Thermal remediation of soil and groundwater contamination
Published in Poul L. Bjerg, Peter Engesgaard, Thomas D. Krom, Groundwater 2000, 2020
Steam Injection: For soils with permeabilities greater than 10−3 cm/sec, energy input rates, and thus heating rates, are relatively high with steam injection. Injection pressures are scaled with respect to the depth of the injection interval (11.3 kPa/m from ground surface). The distance between wells should be similar the depth to the zone targeted for clean-up. Hexagonal patterns are preferred and injection wells should surround the contaminated zone to eliminate spreading. Within the contaminated region, wells should be designed to allow the flexibility for either steam injection or fluid extraction. Steam injection has the benefit of allowing controlled pressure gradients in the subsurface which benefits displacement of liquids toward the extraction wells.
A Novel Process for Upgrading Heavy Oil Emulsions
Published in Michael C. Oballa, Stuart S. Shih, Catalytic Hydroprocessing of Petroleum and Distillates, 2020
As conventional oil reserves continue to decrease it will become necessary to utilize high sulphur (sour) heavy crudeoil or bottoms in the near future. This is particularly true for Canada which has extensive reserves of heavy crude oils. Current technologies for the recovery of heavy oils involve steam flooding, cyclic steam injection, or fire flooding of reservoirs. These methods often produce stable water-in-oil emulsions which must be treated prior to being transported by pipeline. In addition, Canadian heavy oils typically contain 2 to 6 wt% sulphur [1]. A significant amount of this sulphur must be removed because of the potential for catalyst poisoning as well as environmental considerations. Therefore, emulsion treatment and desulphurization of heavy oils must occur before recovered heavy oils can be utilized in a refinery process.
Heavy Oil Recovery
Published in Chun Huh, Hugh Daigle, Valentina Prigiobbe, Maša Prodanović, Practical Nanotechnology for Petroleum Engineers, 2019
Chun Huh, Hugh Daigle, Valentina Prigiobbe, Maša Prodanović
At this point, it is important to make a distinction between the (mainly physical) techniques to enhance the oil recovery efficiency and the (mainly chemical) techniques to enhance the quality of oil. Steam injection to lower oil viscosity, thereby drastically reducing the displacement mobility ratio, is a representative “recovery enhancement” technique. Breaking the asphaltene and resin molecules and their molecular networks, with combined use of thermal energy and catalyst, as mentioned above and will further be described below, is a representative “quality enhancement” technique. It is noted here that another important “quality enhancement” technique is the physical removal of asphaltenes and resins from oil, especially when their mass fraction is not large. Such removal is important because it is believed that even a small amount of such molecular networks causes a significant increase in oil viscosity. This approach is described in more detail in Section 12.3.4.
A novel method to assess steam injection rate in the steam-flooding process of shallow heavy oil reservoirs
Published in Energy Sources, Part A: Recovery, Utilization, and Environmental Effects, 2020
Xiaoliang Huang, Pengkun Wang, Jie Tian, Zhilin Qi, Wende Yan, Yin Qian, Sainan Li, Shuqiang Shi
As an unconventional oil and gas resource, heavy oil reservoirs have important production value. In order to reduce the cost and improve the effect of reservoir development, foam flooding (Zhou et al. 2020a, 2020b), and polymer flooding (Ding et al. 2020) have been widely studied in recent years. However, these technologies are not perfect and cannot be applied to reservoir development on a large scale. Therefore, steam injection thermal recovery is still the main method to develop heavy oil reservoirs. As a mature enhanced oil recovery (EOR) technique, steam flooding is widely used in developing heavy oil reservoirs (Dong et al. 2019; Lamy et al. 2018). In the process of steam-flooding development, appropriate design of injection and production parameters determines the ultimate effect on production from the reservoir (Temizel et al. 2013). Among them, the design of steam injection rate plays a crucial role. A significant number of previous research results have shown that excessive steam injection rate leads to low economic benefits of production and that too low a steam injection rate leads to poor reservoir development. There should be an optimal steam injection rate to ensure reservoir development effect and economic benefits (Al Shaibi and Al Abri 2018).
Effects of minerals on steam distillation during thermal heavy-oil recovery: An experimental investigation
Published in Energy Sources, Part A: Recovery, Utilization, and Environmental Effects, 2018
Yashar Tavakkoli Osgouei, Mahmut Parlaktuna
Steam injection is known as the most common hot fluid injection technique used in thermal recovery method in heavy oil production and constitutes three main mechanisms, namely, thermal expansion of oil, viscosity reduction, and steam distillation. Steam distillation is a primary mechanism for the thermal recovery of oil by the generation of light and liquefied hydrocarbons causing more significant recovery efficiency through both driving force that pushes original oil forward and viscosity reduction by the action of dilution. Steam distillation system is not limited to the mixture of reservoir fluids (crude oil, water, steam, and hydrocarbon vapor) but affected by the surrounding reservoir rocks - limestone or sandstone rocks including clay and non-clay minerals (Bagheripour Haghighi, Ayatollahi, and Shabaninejad 2012; Vafaei et al. 2008; Wu 1977).
Effect of Fe2O3 and WO3 nanoparticle on steam injection recovery
Published in Energy Sources, Part A: Recovery, Utilization, and Environmental Effects, 2018
Sahar Afzal, Mohammad Reza Ehsani, Mohammad Nikookar, Emad Roayaei
Steam injection is one of the commercial technologies used to produce heavy oil from its reservoirs. Many researches have shown that oil recovery has increased and residual oil saturation has decreased under steam injection and hot-water flooding by increasing temperature. Nanotechnology has already contributed significantly to the technological advances in several industries. Fan et al. (2006) investigated on using ionic liquid to upgrade heavy oil recovery experimentally. They observed that ionic liquid [(Et)NH][AlCl] could decrease viscosity and average molecular weight of the heavy oil. Their results showed that the bonds which were formed between ionic liquids and organic sulfur in heavy oil are very weak due to weak CS bonds (Fan et al., 2006).