Enhanced Oil Recovery Using Em Waves

• Main Author: Nurul Shahida Binti Salleh, Nurul Shahida
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Universiti Teknologi Petronas 2010
• Subjects: TK Electrical engineering. Electronics Nuclear engineering
• Online Access: http://utpedia.utp.edu.my/1128/1/dissertation_report.pdf; http://utpedia.utp.edu.my/1128/

Nowadays, there are four common methods of Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) used in the industry which are included Thermal recovery, Chemical injection, Gas injection and Seismic approach. This project is about to improve the existing EOR methods where EM waves is going to be used as a safer, cheaper, reusable and simple tool that can help to increase the production of crude oil in industry. The mechanism that would help to improve the oil mobility is the EM wave’s propagation itself where during this propagation, a kind of energy is actually being transferred from a point to a point. A source of frequency to the transmitter is supplied so that it can transmit and transfer the energy to the crude oil and this energy would cause the molecules in the crude oil to vibrate, moving apart more frequently and thus this will help the mobility of the oil itself. For sea bed logging application, we cannot achieve the fluid resonance frequency which is few Mega hertz because it may cause the EM waves is not penetrating to the focus point (reservoir) due to nearer skin depth. The skin depth equation ωμσ δ = 2 is referred in order to know how much EM waves could penetrate and diffuse into the reservoir, where σ is electrical conductivity, μ is magnetic permeability and ω is the angular frequency of the current. Therefore, 1 KHz of frequency is used as the transmitter source in order to make sure that EM waves could diffuse into the core sample and transfer energy to the crude oil molecules. Shape and size of the transmitter would determine how efficient it is in extracting energy from the radio waves and due to this reason, a transmitter with hexagon shape is designed so that it can transmit a powerful EM waves to the core rock sample. In the experiments conducted, it was concluded that the designed transmitter with nanoparticle magnetic feeder and amplifier could has a recovery of 10-12%OOIP. The field strength was increase by 96.7% when two magnetic feeders with diameter of 0.5cm and amplifier are used together with the transmitter.