Events

Speaker:  Dr. Konstantinos Kostarelos, Associate Professor, University of Houston

Title of Seminar: “A successful field application of chemical EOR—thanks to the Daring Danes!”

Abstract: In the USA, early work to adapt surfactant flooding for use in the environmental sector was focused on low trapping number (NT) approaches in order to prevent mobilizing oil and not create an oil bank.  This “solubilization only” approach requires many PVs of surfactant throughput, however, that can increase the cost for a field application in terms of materials and labor.  Fortunately, a client in Denmark was willing to be more daring—and use a low-tension, high NT approach that would create an oil bank and recover 30,000 kg of spilled immiscible liquid (jet A fuel) in about 6 months.  The talk will review the design considerations and the lessons learned from this successful field application of traditional chemical enhanced oil recovery (EOR).

Biography:   Dr. Kostarelos is an Associate Professor in the newly-formed Petroleum Engineering Department at the University of Houston (UH).  He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin, working on an inter-disciplinary team that adapted several petroleum industry technologies for environmental applications with Gary Pope’s group.  The research group adapted various enhanced oil recovery (EOR) techniques to recover toxic immiscible liquids from the subsurface.  Before joining UH, Dr. Kostarelos was on the faculty at The University of Cyprus where he and his colleagues founded the NIREAS International Water Research Center, which included his Subsurface Research Laboratory, with a 2.5 M€ award from the CPRF.  His research interests in the general area of flow in porous media include EOR technologies, Partitioning Interwell Tracer Testing, among others.  His work has also involved development of an NIR-based, optical fiber chemical sensor for use in the subsurface and he has recently completed “proof-of-concept” work on a technique to remove asphaltenes from crude as a means of addressing a common flow assurance problem.