PHYSICAL-CHEMICAL STUDY OF ZnO-MWCNT NANOPARTICLES FOR A WATER FLOODING EXPERIMENT IN ENHANCED OIL RECOVERY (EOR)

Extracting the trapped oil is still one of the main challenges faced by the oil and
gas industry to this point of time. Conventional recovery methods like chemical,
thermal, alkaline and gas are found not able to meet the expectations and demands of
the current era. Therefore the industry has started to look forward at non-conventional
methods. Nanotechnologywith the impressive size ofparticles gave the hope to tackle
this problem. Therefore, injection ofdielectric nanofluids with different surface nature
accompanied with electromagnetic waves has been proposed to enhance recovery
efficiency in enhanced oil recovery(EOR) stage. It was found that the viscosity of the
dielectric nanofluid changes and increases with exposure to electric field which can
provide better sweep efficiency during water flooding experiment. Hydrophilic Zinc
oxide (ZnO) and hydrophobic MultiWall Carbon Nanotubes (MWCNT) were used as
dielectric material. Successfully, ZnO was synthesized by sol-gel method in the
presence of gelatin type B as a gelatinization agent with mean size 20 nm. Then the
microstructure properties of both of ZnO and MWCNT were investigated.