Combination of Nanoparticles and Microwave Technologies for Extraction of Oil from Carbonate Rock

Abstract

Core samples extraction is one of the main processes before routine core analyses. This process consumes time and chemical solvent so, it is necessary to find new techniques and materials to increase the efficiency of extraction method with less time and chemical consumption. The objective of this research project is to use the microwave and nanoparticle-assisted technologies in the extraction of oil in rock samples. The samples of carbonate reservoir rocks used in this research. Microwave heating can be a powerful tool for thermal treatments because many benefits can be achieved as proven by previous research. However, an increase in the efficiency of the nanoparticles assisted microwaves has been demonstrated in the extraction by adding the nano silica with different weight ratios to the solvent used in the experiments and exposing samples to the microwave effect under different powers then comparing the results with that of samples treated with microwave only. The experiments showed that the adding 0.1 wt % of nano silica reduced cleaning time to approximately 70% less than cleaning by using the microwave technique without nano silica; that can refer to the high efficiency of nano silica assistance in rock extraction; Furthermore, the application of multicriteria analysis has been used in the real case and shows that the most important criteria for cleaning efficiency were process control, rock properties and chemical consumption respectively. Also, it was found that the assisted microwave extractor using the toluene solvent—nano silica as a cleaning agent has priority over the other technique for cleaning plug samples.