Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

The oil sands in western Canada account for 180 of the 185 billion barrels of recoverable oil but contain heavy oil and bitumen whose viscosity ranges from 1,000 to over one million centipoises (water is 1 cP). The recovery of the in-situ heavy oil relies on our ability to reduce the oil's viscosity and mobilize it in the pore space of tightly packed sand grains or consolidated carbonate rocks. Commercially, energy and water intensive thermal methods are used where steam is injected into one well, viscosity is reduced by heat transfer, the oil is mobilized to the production well and brought to the surface. A less energy intensive and more sustainable method uses light hydrocarbon solvents instead of steam to reduce the bitumen's viscosity via mass transfer. The goal of the ""Quantification of the Concentration Dependent Diffusivity and Dispersivity of Light Hydrocarbons in Heavy Oil"" is to 1) further examine the concentration dependent diffusivity of light hydrocarbons in heavy oil and bitumen, and 2) quantify the mass transfer at the pore scale. The first goal is to expand the previously developed mathematical model. (James et al. 2010) The new model will incorporate thermodynamics for non-ideal solutions. Using the new model we will perform a parametric study to develop an empirical correlation for the diffusivity of light hydrocarbons in heavy oil/bitumen. The novelty of this work would be the development of a new empirical correlation to replace historic correlations. The second goal is to quantify the mass transfer at the pore scale by developing a methodology to measure the dispersivity of solvent in heavy oil, then using the dispersivity and the diffusivity; we will calculate the dispersion coefficient for laboratory conditions and compare it to otherwise found (back calculated, tuned parameter or correlation) dispersion coefficients. Separate knowledge of the dispersion and diffusion will provide insight into the pore-scale physics and enable a more accurate physical description of the process in pre scale mathematical models.