The days
of easy oil extraction are dwindling across the globe, bringing an imperative
for careful and inventive ways to utilize the Earth’s remaining fossil fuel
resources. Tadeusz Patzek at KAUST is a leading expert in onshore and offshore
oil recovery processes. He is committed to maintaining oil and gas production
at sustainable levels to give scientists and engineers the opportunity to find
replacement fuels for the future.
“Put succinctly, the key to my research is how to maintain oil
and gas recovery for longer,” says Patzek. “A changing climate means there is
little doubt that the oil and gas industry will have to change drastically. Oil
and gas are priceless resources that we must use wisely and not burn
mindlessly. Long-term field management to maximize ultimate recovery is now a
key issue and lowering production costs is another.”
Patzek arrived at KAUST in early 2015 from the United States,
where he had worked for many years at Shell Development, the University of
California at Berkeley, and the University of Texas. As well as being a key
faculty member, Patzek is director of the new Ali I. Al-Naimi Petroleum
Engineering Research Center (ANPERC) at KAUST, which he has established and
built up over the past two years.
“ANPERC’s focus is on the wise use of hydrocarbon-based energy,
working on ways of extracting the remaining natural gas and oil reserves with
the smallest possible environmental impact,” says Patzek. “A main goal is to
produce interdisciplinary research on fluid flow in complex geological
formations. The future of hydrocarbon fuels relies on effective flow
mechanisms, using water, heat and chemicals to ensure efficient and safe
recovery.”
In the 1980s, within a few weeks of starting as a researcher at Shell
Development, Patzek came up with a radically new description of foam flow in
porous rock. The insights from his research helped to revolutionize foam
recovery—a process by which high-pressure foam is pumped into
difficult-to-reach oil reservoirs and porous rocks holding oil or gas droplets
to release reserves that would otherwise be impossible to retrieve.
Patzek has been the architect of many breakthroughs in
waterflood, foam and steam-based oil and natural gas recovery processes. As a
chemical processes engineer and applied physicist, he has used computational
modeling to visualize the optimal extraction methods for complex
reservoirs.
The success of waterflooding—using water to displace oil from
pore spaces in rocks—depends upon the localized geology of a site, the pH and
salinity of the extraction water, and the water already present within the rock
with consideration for the chemical composition of the rock itself. In a 2017
paper, Patzek and his team used models to demonstrate the complexities of using
low-salinity waterflooding in calcite—a carbonate mineral often found in
limestone1.
Carbonate-based reservoirs remain challenging to extract from, not least
because acidic water can rapidly dissolve calcite.
Over the past five years, Patzek has lent his expertise to the
controversial process of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking; the extraction of
natural gas from shale rock by breaking apart, or fracturing, the rock layers
using high-pressure fluids to release gas trapped inside. Patzek’s recent work
modeling the potential yields from fracking sites in the U.S. suggests that
forecasts of a ‘flood’ of natural gas stemming from these shale formations may
be overestimated.
In October 2017, at the Annual Technical Conference and
Exhibition in San Antonio, Texas, Patzek’s team presented on their current
research, including a paper outlining a novel, simple physics-based model that
can predict production from shale oil wells2. Their model uses parameters from the physics of oil
recovery and hydrofractured well geometries and appears to be more accurate and
robust than other prediction methods.
These are the kind of oil-recovery methods that scientists hope
will bridge the gap while we find alternative fuels for the future. However, as
Patzek reminds us, the focus must be on revolutionizing how we perceive oil and
natural gas and ensuring that these new recovery methodologies do not make us
complacent.
Read about this story in KAUST Discovery.