Fundamental study of enhanced oil recovery

After water flooding, main part of the oil remains trapped in the reservoir. To recover more oil from the reservoir, several methodologies can be used referred to improved and enhanced oil recovery. Enhanced oil recovery portfolio comprises several methods such as surfactant flooding Alkaline Surfactant Polymer (ASP), foam injection, nano-technology, microbial enhanced recovery, low salinity water injection.

Although each of these techniques target specific property of rock-crude oil- brine system, such as interfacial tension, wettability, or mobility ratio, they share the common objective of the reduction of the capillary trapping. Several factors such as rock morphology, rock surface chemistry, crude oil chemistry and initial and injected brine composition can control the success of these techniques.
Research on enhanced oil recovery goes back to several decades ago. Although a wealth of researchers focuses on this topic, understanding and optimization of the employed technology according to the rock-crude oil- brine system is an active research area. The general objective of this project is to investigate fundamentals of enhanced oil recovery and the focus of the project is open.
The successful candidate will develop novel computational models to simulate the experimental results at micro scale and core scale. The project will cover image analysis, development of numerical models, and laboratorial experiments at micro scale and core scale for validation objectives. The applicant ideally should have a 1st or 2:1 degree (or equivalent) in Petroleum engineering, hydrogeology, fields related to flow and transport in porous media. The applicant should be familiar with programming and should have experience in laboratorial experiments, data management and data processing.

Successful candidates will be enrolled in the 3-year Ph.D. program of the School of Chemical Engineering and Analytical Science. Starting date is negotiable.

The successful PhD candidate will be a member of the IMPRES (Integrated Multiscale Porous media Research) team, which has been recently established. IMPRES team focused on diverse problems of porous media applications across different scales through advanced computational and experimental methods. The state-of-the-art micromodel lab, access to DIAMOND X-ray synchrotron and microCT imaging facilities are some of the available experimental facilities.