(340d) Stimuli Responsive Nano-Agents: From Drug Delivery to Oil and Gas Industry

Several concepts that have been successfully used for targeted drug delivery for medical diagnostics and treatment can lend themselves to some key oil and gas applications, despite the clear differences in the systems and environments involved. An example of such concepts is the utilization of stimuli responsive materials to deliver treatment or image contrast agents to specific targets in the human body, or the oil reservoir, without the side effects and unnecessary costs associated with excess release or delivery of agents to where they are not needed.

The Responsive Reservoir Nano-agents Program was initiated at Saudi Aramco’s upstream Advanced Research Center in 2016. The main objective of this program is to develop nano-agents that can travel deep into the reservoir to collect reservoir information or deliver chemical treatments to hard-to-reach regions, autonomously by exploiting the induced or natural chemical and physical conditions in the reservoir. These regions are hardly accessed by conventional water or gas flooding techniques.

In this talk, a proof-of-concept on the effect of salt and surfactant gradients on the migration of reservoir nano-agents will be presented. The experiments use novel microfluidic devices and direct microscopic visualization to quantify the migration of solid colloidal particles (<1µm) under different gradients and to understand the underpinning electrokinetic and interfacial phenomena. The results demonstrate the ability of salinity and surfactant gradients to transport reservoir nano-agents up or down the imposed gradients in a predictable way. In this way, natural or induced gradients in the reservoir can be exploited to direct the reservoir nano-agents to certain regions in the reservoir for discovering or recovering the trapped resources.