Using Nanoparticles Coating to Enhance Proppant Functions to Achieve Sustainable Production

Abstract

Proppant bed plays a critical role in enhancing oil and gas production in stimulated wells. In the last two decades, there have been consistent efforts to improve shape characteristics and mechanical strength properties to guarantee high permeability in the resultant propped fracture. However tuning wettability of proppants have not yet engineered considerably maybe because natural sand has been a typical raw material for proppant manufacturing. However, water wet proppants may not only limit production due to reduced hydrocarbon relative permeability but also facilitate fine migration through the proppant bed. Fine migration and increasing water saturation may deteriorate oil production over time. Intrinsic hydrophobicity of graphitic surfaces and their two-dimensional geometries made them a promising candidate for coating proppant to alter its wettability. In this paper, we present a methodology for treating proppant surfaces with graphite nanoplatelets. Standard laboratory tests following modified API RP61 have conducted to show the effectiveness of the proposed methodology.