Grant: Alliance Grants

The successful completion of the Fundamentals of Unconventional Recovery lead by the primary Investigator, Dr. Apostolos Kantzas, is in its second term. FUR II is an expanded program reflecting the changing needs of the oil and gas industry during a time of societal transformation. The work of FUR II has been established with industry to rebuild the viability of the energy sector. The new extraction technologies will expose novel fundamental knowledge of nano-scale and pore-scale interactions in the recovery of deep resource reservoirs. Heavy oil and bitumen enhanced oil recovery will support advances that drive water reduction technologies by using advanced imaging and rock analysis tomography of porous media, chemical and physical processes applied to the current knowledge of computational fluid dynamics modelling. The second project is focused on Tight enhanced oil recovery. Pore scale permeability in tight oil will be addressed in novel reservoir rock characterizations developed during FUR II. A new level of analysis that was not previously possible will be developed and the data from the experiments will change current models and lead to the development of new models. Canada's oil and gas economic downturn has led to new legislation around production. With this work, Dr. Kantzas is addressing the concerns of citizens that are environmentally and economically based: reduce fresh water use, shrink greenhouse gas emissions and lower capital and operating costs. The impetus from Term I Fur I will continue to provide insight into the momentum made to advance heat and mass transfer processes media contained water, oil, gases and solvents. Term II Fur II is going to address industry needs and in turn, Canadian values.