Using seawater to transition offshore energy production from petroleum to clean energy
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- The most abundant material on our planet, seawater, could help us to build a bridge between the fossil fuel industry and human-timescale renewable energy resources. In this thesis, I show that seawater can enhance oil recovery from porous media and store electrical energy. Therefore, seawater unlocks clean offshore energy storage hubs. This report shows that seawater (1) can alter the wettability of carbonate porous media towards more water-wet conditions that are favorable for oil recovery and (2) can store chemical energy after oil removal from porous media. Specifically, my work demonstrates that seawater enhances oil recovery from carbonate fields and offshore petroleum reservoirs could become underground porous electrodes of a giant redox flow battery. With this proposal, I use seawater as a base material for the design of the injection water and add ions that help to detach oil from the rock. I enable seawater as injection fluid to increase oil recovery by wettability alteration adding ions that have been proved to help oil recovery. The mean water contact angle of the ganglia showed a 28% contact angle reduction from an oil-wet to a water-wet system when using a tuned seawater composition with high salinity in a tertiary displacement. The wettability alteration might not be as drastic as simplified ion compositions or diluted seawater, but it potentially provides a more economically efficient solution. In this way, I contribute to enhanced oil recovery and with an eye toward the economics involved in tuning the seawater to make it an injection fluid that alters wettability. I induced potential on a connate salinity and seawater salinity brines cell set-up to transfer sulfide reverting the redox reaction and therefore storing energy. Hence, a seawater ion-exchange cell could be considered as one of the most attractive candidate applications for offshore large-scale energy storage and chemical ionic tuning. Despite the fact that a seawater-battery has lesser gravimetric and volumetric energy density, natural underground reservoir electrodes have the size to make large scale energy storage possible.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2019; ©2019 |
| Publication date | 2019; 2019 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Ramirez Ovalle, Grecia Lucina |
|---|---|
| Degree committee member | Kovscek, Anthony R. (Anthony Robert) |
| Thesis advisor | Kovscek, Anthony R. (Anthony Robert) |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Energy Resources Engineering. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Grecia Lucina R. O. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Energy Resources Engineering. |
| Thesis | Thesis Engineering Stanford University 2019. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2019 by Grecia Lucina Ramirez Ovalle
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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