SUBHASH MISHRA
Dhanbad, June 14: The ambitious project proposal of the IIT Indian School of Mines (ISM) Dhanbad faculty members has been selected under the Scheme for Promotion of Academic and Research Collaboration (SPARC), a plan of the Ministry of HRD.
Prof Ajay Mandal of IIT ISM, petroleum engineering department, and his team have made the project proposal of development surfactant-based micro emulsion.
Prof Keka Ojha, IIT ISM petroleum engineering department, Prof Lau Hon Chung of NUS Singapore (International Principal Investigator) and Prof Ofer Manor of Technion, Israel are other members of the team.
The team had submitted the idea of the project on November 11, 2019, and was selected by HRD on June 10, 2023, for improving the research ecosystem of higher educational institutions. The team would get a grant of Rs 75 lakh for this two years project.
“Increasing world consumption of oil, coupled with declining reserves, is attracting new ideas and methodologies for producing crude oil from mature reservoirs,” said Prof Mandal.
He said even after the exhaustion of natural drive and water-flooding processes, about two-thirds of the original oil in place (OOIP) remains unproduced. Mandal added that enhanced oil recovery (EOR) processes encompass many methods for increasing the recovery of the remaining oil in a reservoir after the natural pressure is depleted.
“Polymer augmented surfactant-based micro-emulsion flooding is a promising enhanced oil recovery (EOR) technique involving the use of water-soluble polymeric compounds to stabilize the injected surfactant-based micro-emulsion fluid, which in turn mobilizes and extracts in-situ crude oil from a petroleum reservoir” explained Prof Mandal.
He said that polymer increases the viscosity of the injected micro-emulsion, thereby reducing the water/oil mobility ratio.
“This allows a better sweep of crude oil trapped within reservoir pores by capillary and viscous forces and is beneficial in controlling crude oil mobility,” said Prof Mandal. He said that incorporating polymer/polymeric compounds comprises various enhanced physicochemical attributes and diverse research areas.
The literature on polymer-augmented micro-emulsion-based EOR is rare. Given the importance of this study in the world oil production industry, this proposal paves the way toward developing a systemized approach toward the screening, characterization, optimization and application of micro emulsions stabilized by the polymer in the field of tertiary oil recovery.
