Water-carbon dioxide emulsions for improved CO₂ sequestration and enhanced oil recovery in depleted carbonate reservoirs

Scope:
-    Use of CO₂ emulsions to control mobility in depleted reservoirs for CO₂ sequestration combined with enhanced oil recovery
-    Application of atomistic methods to estimate the impact of surfactants on chemical potential profiles, interface properties, and foam texture
-    Selection of most promising surfactant candidates

Results:
-    Extensive benchmark tests performed to assess parallel performance of mixed GPU/CPU-acceleration (LAMMPS code), purely GPU-acceleration (HOOMD-BLUE code) on a single workstation versus CPU-only speedup provided by Hexagon Cray supercomputer.
-    PhD candidate, Juri Selvåg, attended an intensive course at the Stanford University at Palo Alto, California, USA, August 3 – 7, 2015, and two courses at the UiB as a part of his PhD curriculum.
-    Several massive molecular dynamics simulations of binary water-carbon dioxide and ternary water-carbon dioxide-NFM/NAM completed.
-    MD results analysed via several in-house tools to estimate emulsifiers’ potential to stabilize initial H2O-CO₂ emulsion.
-    Density maps smoothed by application of Gaussian filters allowed us to pinpoint the intrinsic surface of the interface
-    This knowledge is essential for estimating the surface tension and energy profiles.
-    Results indicate a need to modify tested compounds to increase their hydrophilic properties.
-    Finding microscopic estimators for the above properties (association energy to estimate aggregation, velocity autocorrelation functions vs Green-Kubo approach for viscosity evaluation, potential of mean force for free energy calculations
-    Detailed chemical structure files for four asphaltene-like «digital-oil» components received from our collaborators from the Kyoto University, Japan.
-    These compounds rendered in the form suitable for numeric and MD analyses using Jaguar quantum chemistry packages.
-    Joint paper with VISTA postdoc working on Phase Field Theory-based modelling of emulsions submitted to Energy and Fuels journal.
-    Paper describing findings related to atomistic simulations submitted to Molecular Simulation journal.