Recent and Upcoming Events

Enhanced Oil Recovery Fourteenth Annual Workshop was held on November 22

The Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) Industrial Affiliates Program (IAP) held its fourteenth annual workshop on Friday, November 22, at Penn State University Park, including a dinner on Thursday, November 21.

The EOR IAP focused on research topics in gas flooding, chemically-tuned water flooding, and alkali-surfactant-polymer (ASP) flooding, along with various hybrid techniques. The program currently funds research projects that use analytical, experimental, and numerical methods supervised by five Penn State faculty members.

Some notable accomplishments of the EOR IAP include developing the first multiple contact mixing cell algorithm to calculate the minimum miscibility pressure (MMP) for combined condensing/vaporizing drives; developing the first surface complexation reaction equations for wettability alteration in low salinity waterflooding; publishing the first equation-of-state for microemulsions; developing a novel coupled equation-of-state approach for relative permeability and capillary pressure that makes compositional simulation truly compositional, more robust, more accurate, and faster computationally; developing a new transport mechanism based on diffusion as the primary unifying mechanism of oil and gas production in shales; and developing generalized Riemann solutions that show how to transform MMP calculations and compositional path for gas flood displacement to tie-line space.

First Annual Webinar Short Course on Modeling Aqueous Systems will take place June 22–26

The First Annual Webinar Short Course on Modeling Aqueous Systems: Fundamentals and Modeling Techniques with OLI Studios will take place June 22–26, 2020, hosted by the Penn State EMS Energy Institute.

This course will cover the fundamentals of modeling aqueous solutions and corrosion processes used within OLI Studio. Lectures and hands-on OLI Studio exercises will be used to demonstrate how complex systems can be modeled. This course is appropriate for those new to OLI Studio, professionals working with this software, and those looking for a refresher course in its underlying theory. Modeling walkthroughs will be presented using OLI’s Stream Analyzer, Corrosion Analyzer, and Studio ScaleChem programs.

Lecture Topics will include:

• Chemical Potential, Gibbs Energy and Standard States
• Concentration, Ionic Strength and Activity Coefficients
• Chemical Equilibria, Speciation, and pH
• Phase Equilibria and Gibbs Energy Minimization
• Redox Reactions, Redox Potentials, and the Nernst Equation
• Pourbaix (Potential-pH) Diagrams
• Overpotential and Polarization Curves
• Mixed Potential Theory
• Corrosion Rate and Types of Corrosion
• The Role of Aqueous Thermodynamics in Scaling
• The Role of Gas-Water Interactions in Scaling

The course fee is $1,500 and covers all instruction and course notes.

For more information about the short course, contact Derek M. Hall at Hall@psu.edu.