Grants and Contributions:

Grant or Award spanning more than one fiscal year. (2017-2018 to 2022-2023)

Shale oil resources have proven to be quickly producible in large quantities at relatively low cost, and have recently revolutionized the oil and gas industry. Typically, only 3 to 7% of the oil-in-place is recoverable by using current technologies. The oil content in a shale oil formation includes free oil contained in inorganic pores and trapped oil in the organic material called kerogen. The latter can represent a significant portion of the total oil and our knowledge on how to recover it is very little, yet production of shale oil currently targets only the free oil rather than the trapped oil in kerogen. Shale oil reservoirs also have a substantial capacity to store CO 2 by dissolving it in kerogen. The lack of methods to enhance oil recovery from shale oil reservoirs motivates us to conduct a simultaneous experimental and theoretical study on the physical interaction of CO 2 and kerogen.

In this research program, we will develop several new experimental methods to analyse the petrophysical properties of kerogen to find how much oil is trapped in kerogen, how they can be recovered by using CO 2 , and how much CO 2 can be stored in shale oil reservoirs after CO 2 injection for shale oil recovery. Our preliminary results have shown that, during CO 2 injection into a shale oil reservoir, CO 2 can penetrate into the kerogen matrix due to a strong affinity and interaction of CO 2 with kerogen molecules, and simultaneously expels oil from spaces between kerogen molecules. We will experimentally test this hypothesis and find the mechanisms of the process. This type of displacement of oil by CO 2 in kerogen has not been studied before. We hypothesize that this process can deplete the organic oil saturation in shale oil by means of CO 2 injection, thereby achieving not only oil recovery but also CO 2 sequestration.
The objective of this research is to develop the most effective CO 2 enhanced oil recovery and sequestration process for shale oil reservoirs. Successful application of the proposed CO 2 -oil counter-current displacement mechanism can get an additional 15% to 20% of shale oil recovered in field. This means that the recoverable shale oil can be doubled or even tripled. The outcomes of this research are also applicable to CO 2 enhanced gas recovery and sequestration in coalbed methane and shale gas formations.