Eur. Phys. J. Plus (2020) 135: 91
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/s13360-020-00104-5

Regular Article

New insight on dynamic behavior of swelling and bond number of light and heavy crude oil during carbonated water flooding

¹ School of Chemical Engineering, Babol Noshirvani University of Technology, Babol, Iran
² Atieyh Pouyandegan Exir Technologies Co., Arak Incubation Center, Markazi Science and Technology Park, Arak, Iran
³ Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) Research Centre, School of Chemical and Petroleum Eng., Shiraz University, Shiraz, Iran
⁴ School of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering, Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran

^* e-mail: m.lashkarbolooki@nit.ac.ir

Received: 18 June 2019
Accepted: 3 January 2020
Published online: 17 January 2020

Abstract

Improving oil recovery and decreasing greenhouse gas emissions are two important attractive features of CO₂-enriched water injection into oil reservoirs. Regarding these unique features, the main objective of this study was concentrated to evaluate the swelling behavior of crude oil as a fundamental mechanism of carbonated water (CW) flooding. To achieve these goals, the swelling and Bond number of light and heavy crude oils (namely LCO and HCO, respectively) are measured and compared to each other. The results obtained from the measured swelling factors of crude oil/CW show some complicated behaviors. That is, as temperature increases the swelling factor decreases at low pressure conditions, while at high pressure a reverse trend was observed. In addition, the crossover pressure, which can be contributed to the different swelling behaviors of crude oil for different CO₂ contents of water, was shifted to higher pressure for the LCO compared to that for the HCO.