Chennai: In India, crude oil production is insufficient to meet the nation’s energy demands. India’s oil production has fallen by 4 per cent in the financial year 2018-2019. India has produced only 34.2 million tonnes of crude oil, while in the previous year the country produced 35.7 million tonnes. The Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in collaboration with some researchers in Australia have come up with a method to increase oil production by 120 million tonnes.
Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, researchers in collaboration with the research laboratories of Australia are developing an indigenous process for efficient recovery of oil from offshore wells. Currently, they are studying, “Low-Salinity Enhanced Oil Recovery”(LSEOR), an enhanced oil recovery method. Their research has been published in the journals “Journal of Petroleum” and “Science And Engineering and Energy and Fuels”.
The research which is headed by Dr Jitendra Sangwai, Professor of Petroleum Engineering, Department of Ocean Engineering, IIT, Madras is being jointly funded by IIT Madras and Department of Science and Technology (DST), Government of India.
Dr.Jitendra Sangwai, on his research, says that “Our research aims at developing indigenous methods for recovery of crude oil from geological reservoirs, which is a complex process. There is still much that needs to be understood in the use of LSEOR methods .” He further added that they don’t have a clear idea on the mechanism of wettability alliteration that can be caused by factors such as oil consumption, salt levels in the water, the acidity of the crude oil, mineralogy of the rock and other factors.
Low-Salinity Enhanced Oil Recovery(LSEOR) can be a better oil recovery from offshore reservoirs, since it may reduce the salinity of seawater that is injected into the rock because the presence of certain divalent cations can change the wettability of the rock.
Oil is extracted through the water injection process, a secondary oil recovery method from the rocks filled with oil such as limestone and sandstone. The researchers say that the efficiency of the process depends upon the wettability of the rock. When these stones become hydrophobic they result in inefficient oil extraction. The researchers add that during the LSEOR, they added organic acids and bases to model oil to test the effect of acidity and basicity of oil on wettability. The study resulted in the presence of acidic and basic substances in the oil reduced water wettability, especially in the presence of salt.
