1. Introduction
Water flooding is the most widely used secondary fluid injection process into an oil-bearing formation, after primary depletion, to improve oil recovery potential. Water is pumped from injection wells, sweeping the oil in the reservoir pores, to the production wells. In this course, water preferentially channels and flows through the high-permeability zones, leaving behind a significant amount of displaceable oil in low permeability-bypassed zones of the reservoir. The reservoir conformance problems manifest themselves or arise due to the contrasts in reservoir fluid properties, heterogeneity of reservoir permeability, fluid mobility contrast, etc. [
1]. Moreover, during the productive life of an oilfield, these problems cause the oil to be easily trapped by capillary forces and/or bypassed by the oil recovery-drive fluid, resulting in excessive production of water and, therefore, resulting in poor sweep efficiency. The conformance problems, coupled with the scarcity of new oil field discoveries are the most pressing reasons for the emergence of new oil recovery technologies, aiming to (i) extract about 50% of the original oil in place (OOIP) that is left in the reservoir after primary and secondary recovery stages [
2], (ii) increase oil production rates from existing fields, and (iii) fill the gap between energy supply and demand worldwide.
Nanotechnology has shown great potential to solve some of the above problems and increase profitability for the oil and gas companies. The building block of nanotechnology is the nanoparticle and it operates at the nanoscale. Nanoparticles (NPs) are defined as a collection of atoms bonded together with diameter size in the range of 1 to 100 nm [
3].
Figure 1 illustrate a nanoparticle, it is composed of a
core, the inner material, and the
shell, the outer layer. The
core determines the properties of a NP, whereas the
shell provides a protective membrane and determines the solubility or binding affinity of the NPs with other materials [
4]. For oil recovery applications, NP is designed to be wetted by both phases, thus be partly hydrophilic and partly hydrophobic [
5]; together with the small size and the large surface area, NPs can have a profound displacement effect on the oil recovery-drive fluid.
The small particle size confers excellent mobility properties; hence, NPs can propagate deeply in the reservoir and increase oil recovery from thief zones and/or from bypassed zones with little retention. With small size, NPs have a large surface area and thus, a large contact area in the swept areas [
6] and improved chemical reactivity properties. Therefore, NPs are suitable candidates for changing the reservoir rock and fluid properties and aid in the sweep efficiency of the injected fluid. In order to be successful for EOR applications, nanoparticles must (i) be stable in high salinity, high temperature, and high pressure reservoirs, (ii) propagate long distance between the injection and production wells with little retention, (iii) adsorb on the desired critical sites of the reservoir, such as the oil/water and fluid/rock interfaces, and (iv) prevent over-deposition on the pores [
7].
One approach to achieving the above conditions and tailor the properties of NPs to improve their sweep efficiency, especially in harsh reservoir environments, is to covalently attach polymer molecules to the surface of the nanoparticles. The resulting novel polymer-coated NPs have received a wide interest in the oil and gas industry due to their improved solubility and stability, greater stabilization of emulsions and improved mobility through porous media [
8,
9]. Few studies have reported such characteristics for oil recovery. Rodriguez et al. [
10] and Zhang et al. [
11] reported that SiO
NPs coated with polymer molecules have a remarkable transport behaviour through reservoir pores of various permeability with little retention due to their reversible adsorption on the rock surface. Ponnapati et al. [
12] experimentally found that polymer (
Poly-(oligo(ethylen oxide) monomethyl ether methacrylate)-modified SiO
NPs could mobilise residual oil and yield 7.9% of the OOIP. Behzadi and Mohammadi [
13] argues that polymer-coated silica NPs can modulate oil/water interfacial tension and change the wettability of an oil-wet glass micromodel to a more water-wet state, which can confer a greater EOR effect than unmodified silica nanoparticles. Choi et al. [
14] reported that grafting polymer shell layers on the surface of silica NP can improve stability in harsh reservoir conditions. Their core flooding tests could achieve 74.1% of the OOIP with the modified NPs, which was quite comparable to plain water flood (68.9%) and unmodified silica NP. The authors associated the EOR effect to the NPs’ ability to decrease the injection pressure; the authors argued that displacement pressure decrease is related to the formation of a wedge film between the oil and the rock surface. More recently, Bila et al. [
15,
16], Bila and Torsæter [
17] carried out a series of flooding experiments with polymer-coated SiO
NPs in Berea sandstone core plugs. Their studies revealed an incremental recovery ranging from 2.6% to 14% of the OOIP. The authors found that the displacement efficiency of polymer-coated SiO
NPs is better in water-wet cores than that achieved with induced neutral-wet core plugs.
In summary, the application of NPs, at laboratory scale, have shown an incremental recovery of oil ranging from 5 to 15% of the OOIP [
3], the highest reach is 32% of the OOIP [
18,
19]. The most frequent range has been 5% of the OOIP [
20]. Obviously, oil recovery by NPs is a complex phenomenon, partly because the reservoirs are unique and have different characteristics. On the other hand, the variability of experimental approaches in assessing the efficiency of nanoparticle recovery ends up with variable results and variable interpretation of the causes of oil displacement.
Following the encouraging results, studies have demonstrated marvellous efforts to understand the EOR mechanisms of nanofluid flooding. The change in reservoir wettability and the reduction of the interfacial tension are the two well accepted mechanisms of NPs [
20,
21]. Nanoparticles can alter the reservoir’s wettability by (i) adsorbing on the reservoir rock to develop a new surface roughness [
22,
23], destabilizing oil films and desorbing it from the surface, and (ii) applying the structural disjoining pressure mechanism [
24]. The adsorption of charged NPs can change the reservoir’s wetting properties by forming hydrogen bonds with water molecules, there on attracting water molecules to the surface while lifting oil from it [
18,
25]. Further, the adsorption of NPs can reduce the interfacial energy between the rock surface and the oil, which disrupts whatever molecular attachment amongst the rock surface and the oil molecules attached to the surface [
25]. Nanoparticles can also adsorb onto oil/water interface and decrease the interfacial tension between the two phases. For this, the NPs form a mono-layer that replaces the existing oil/water interface, acting as a mechanical barrier and bring the two phases together [
26]. Moreover, depending on the hydrophobicity nature of NPs, they can irreversibly adsorb to the oil/water interface. There, the formed denser layer of NPs can protect oil droplets from flocculation and coalescence via steric mechanism to result in the stabilization of emulsion droplets by nanoparticles [
9,
27]. These emulsions (Pickering emulsions) can travel through the pores of the reservoirs with minimal retention and increase oil recovery [
27].
Aside from the above mentioned mechanisms, NPs can block reservoir pore-throats larger than their size and increase oil recovery via log jamming mechanism [
28,
29]. Nanoparticles can increase the viscosity of EOR fluid and reduce the viscosity of the heavy oil, which can be reflected in a favourable mobility of the displacing and displaced phases, respectively, for oil recovery.
This work aims to expand our previous works [
15,
16] and attempts to investigate the recovery mechanisms of polymer-coated silica NPs under harsh reservoir conditions of high temperature and salinity. The goal is to provide additional experimental results to the data bank on the nanoparticles for enhanced oil recovery projects, while paving the way to improve our understanding of the underlying EOR mechanisms associated with silica nanoparticles.