Oil Industry First Interwell Trial of Reservoir Nanoagent Tracers

Abstract This manuscript reports the industry's first proven reservoir nanoagents' design and describes a successful multi-well field trial using these inexpensive and environmentally friendly nanoparticles that offer an important advantage of fast and cheap fluorometric detection. Our fundamental nanoparticle tracer template, A-Dots or Arab-D dots, is intentionally geared towards the harsh but prolific Arab-D carbonate reservoir environment of 100°C temperature, 150,000 ppm salinity, and an abundant presence of divalent ions in the connate water. The A-Dots were manufactured on a scale of one metric ton from affordable and easily available commodity chemicals. They were injected into a watered-out part of the field and monitored at four nearby producer wells for two years. Monitoring of four neighbouring producer wells over a period of 26 months confirmed nanoparticles' breakthrough at a single producer nearly 500 m from the injector at the reservoir level, thus, proving the nanoparticles' mobility and transport capability. The maximum concentration of the nanoagent in produced water was observed about 10 months after the injection matching the behavior of conventional small-molecule tracers used in the same pair of wells previously. The rate of A-Dots production correlated with the rate of water injection at the original injector well and followed it closely with a 10-month delay. This test bolstered our previous observations of satisfactory recovery of A-Dots in a single-well test by confirming their reservoir stability on industry relevant time scales and demonstrating the feasibility of their industrial production. The importance of this accomplishment is not in how sophisticated the sensing functionality of the tracer design is but rather in the nanoparticle stability, mobility, scalability, and field application potentials. Our findings render the concept of having active, reactive, and even communicative, in-situ reservoir nanoagents for underground sensing and intervention a well anticipated near-future reality.