Title: Nanofluid of graphene-based amphiphilic Janus nanosheets for tertiary or enhanced oil recovery: High performance at low concentration

Abstract

Significance Improving crude oil recovery by 1% worldwide would result in a huge amount of crude oil resources becoming available. However, the economic and environmental concerns are too serious to ignore when chemical methods (surfactants or polymers flooding, etc.) are used for an average 10–20% enhancement for tertiary oil recovery. Simple nanofluid (containing only nanoparticles) flooding at low concentration (0.01 wt % or less) is a promising alternative, but the efficiency is below 5% in a saline environment (2 wt % or higher NaCl content). We report a simple nanofluid of graphene-based Janus amphiphilic nanosheets for enhanced oil recovery with efficiency of about 15.2%, comparable to chemical methods, which is both economically and environmentally beneficial to the petroleum industry.

Authors:

Luo, Dan ^[1]; Wang, Feng ^[2]; Zhu, Jingyi ^[3]; Cao, Feng ^[2]; Liu, Yuan ^[2]; Li, Xiaogang ^[3]; Willson, Richard C. ^[4]; Yang, Zhaozhong ^[3]; Chu, Ching-Wu ^[5]; Ren, Zhifeng ^[2]

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+ Show Author Affiliations

1. Department of Physics and Texas Center for Superconductivity, University of Houston, Houston, TX 77204,, Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, University of Houston, Houston, TX 77204,, State Key Laboratory of Oil and Gas Reservoir Geology and Exploitation, Southwest Petroleum University, Chengdu, Sichuan 610500, China,
2. Department of Physics and Texas Center for Superconductivity, University of Houston, Houston, TX 77204,
3. State Key Laboratory of Oil and Gas Reservoir Geology and Exploitation, Southwest Petroleum University, Chengdu, Sichuan 610500, China,
4. Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, University of Houston, Houston, TX 77204,, Departamento de Biotecnología e Ingeniería de Alimentos, Tecnologico de Monterrey, Monterrey, Nuevo Leon 64849, Mexico,
5. Department of Physics and Texas Center for Superconductivity, University of Houston, Houston, TX 77204,, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720

Publication Date:

Mon Jun 27 00:00:00 EDT 2016

Sponsoring Org.:

USDOE

OSTI Identifier:

1259730

Grant/Contract Number:  

FG02-13ER46917; SC0010831

Resource Type:

Published Article

Journal Name:

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

Additional Journal Information:

Journal Name: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America Journal Volume: 113 Journal Issue: 28; Journal ID: ISSN 0027-8424

Publisher:

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Country of Publication:

United States

Language:

English