Nanofluid of graphene-based amphiphilic Janus nanosheets for tertiary or enhanced oil recovery: High performance at low concentration
Abstract
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.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- Jun 27, 2016
- Source ID
- 10.1073/pnas.1608135113
Entities
People
- Ching-Wu Chu
- Dan Luo
- Feng Cao
- Feng Wang
- Jingyi Zhu
- Richard C Willson
- Xiaogang Li
- Yuan Liu
- Zhaozhong Yang
- Zhifeng Ren
Organizations
- Air Force Office of Scientific Research
- Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
- Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education
- Southwest Petroleum University
- United States Department of Energy
- University of Houston