ABSTRACT
Heavy oil is an immense oil resource that is untapped because its highly viscous nature makes it difficult to produce. Currently, the heavy oil reservoir production challenges are addressed by thermal recovery techniques, CHOPS, chemical injection and miscible gas injection. In this work, the advantages of three different processes viz thermal, chemical and miscible gas injection have been merged together to come up with a novel viscosity reducing process for heavy oil. Metal Nanoparticles are used for thermal conductivity enhancement of super critical-CO2 (sc-CO2) or "Viscosity reducing Injectant" (VRI) for reducing the viscosity of heavy oil rapidly as compared to conventional sc-CO2 or VRI. A sc-CO2 soluble surfactant has also been added to the mixture to further enhance the viscosity reduction. Thus the thermal properties of metal nanoparticles, the chemical properties of surfactant and the miscible properties of sc-CO2 and VRI altogether reduce the viscosity of heavy oil.
