Microbial Enhanced Oil Recovery (MEOR) is potentially useful to increment oil recovery from a reservoir beyond primary and secondary recovery operations using microorganisms and their metabolites. Stimulation of bacterial growth for biosurfactant production and degradation of heavy oil fractions by indigenous microorganisms can enhance the fluidity and reduce the capillary forces that retain th...

The petroleum industry requires the best materials to reverse the rock wettability to water-wet state which give significantly improved oil recovery.Nanoparticles are suggested as enhanced oil recovery potential agents to decrease viscosity and alter the wettability of reservoir towards more water-wet. This study provides new insights into CuO nanoparticles effects on wett...

A successful cross-linked polymer flooding has been implemented in JD reservoir, an ordinary heavy oil reservoir with high permeability zones. For all that, there are still significant volumes of continuous oil remaining in place, which can not be easily extracted due to stronger vertical heterogeneity. Considering selective plugging feature, polymer enhanced foam (PEF) flooding was taken as fo...

The present work proposes for the first time a mathematical model for describing the rheological behavior of heavy and extra-heavy crude oils in the presence of nanoparticles. This model results from the combination of two existing mathematical models. The first one applies to the rheology of pseudoplastic substances, i.e., the Herschel-Bulkley model. The second one was previously developed by ...

Many microorganisms, especially bacteria, produce biosurfactants when grown on water-immiscible substrates. Biosurfactants are more effective, selective, environmentally friendly, and stable than many synthetic surfactants. Most common biosurfactants are glycolipids in which carbohydrates are attached to a long-chain aliphatic acid, while others, like lipopeptides, lipoproteins, and heteropolys...

production of highly viscous tar sand bitumen using steam assisted gravity drainage (sagd) with a pair of horizontal wells has advantages over conventional steam flooding. this paper explores the use of artificial neural networks (anns) as an alternative to the traditional sagd simulation approach. feed forward, multi-layered neural network meta-models are trained through the back-error-propaga...