Research Projects

India stands in the third position in energy consumption globally, and the maximum of this energy comes from fossil fuels like crude oil, coal, natural gas, etc. Although a tremendous research effort is being spent on the replacement of these fossil fuels by renewable sources like solar, wind, hydroelectric, etc., however, we still need to rely a lot on the energy produced from traditional fossil fuels such as crude oil before these renewable forms of energy take the lead in the future. India mostly imports this crude oil from overseas countries despite having several oil fields and reservoirs in different parts of the country. However, the oil recovery rate from these fields is very poor due to the lack of development and utilization of advanced technology. Therefore, in 2018, the ministry of petroleum and natural gas, Govt. of India, proposed the ER (Enhanced Recovery) policy to discover and apply new technologies for enhanced crude oil recovery. In this regard, this project proposal aims to develop a novel and smart enhanced oil recovery (sEOR) method for extracting residual oil from an underground reservoir. The proposed method will be based on two latest hot research topics, namely, the elastic turbulence (ET) phenomenon and the nanobubble technology. This ET phenomenon originates due to the non-linear elastic stresses present in a viscoelastic fluid at negligible Reynolds numbers and results in a chaotic and fluctuating flow field as in regular hydrodynamic turbulence. Therefore, it could be successfully used to increase the overall volumetric oil sweeping efficiency from a porous network of an oil field where the flow mostly remains in the creeping regime. On the other hand, nanobubbles are tiny gas bubbles of sizes of a few to a few hundred nanometers, which could easily penetrate through the small pores of a porous rock and potentially reduce the interfacial tension between the oil and displacing fluid, making the proposed method more energy-efficient. This project will particularly use CO₂ nanobubbles; therefore, it will provide a way to reduce or sequestrate this particular greenhouse gas, making it more eco-friendly. The investigation will be carried out based on both extensive experiments and simulations. Experiments will include pore-scale visualization of the oil displacement mechanism in a microfabricated porous chip under a microscope and microscale study in a sandstone core using X-ray microtomography. On the other hand, pore-scale multiphase simulations will be performed based on the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) technique to understand better and get more insights into the oil displacement mechanism. Our proposed novel, energy-efficient, and eco-friendly smart enhanced oil recovery (sEOR) method based on the nanobubble dispersed elastic turbulence phenomenon has the potential to revolutionize the energy sector of India, which is one of the primary focuses of the Indian government due to significant energy demand.