The impact of the oil character and quartz sands on the thermal behavior and kinetics of crude oil

Oxidation reaction plays an important role in air flooding. In this paper, three oxidation reaction stages of both light and heavy oils, as well as mixtures of oil and quartz sands are studied at four heating rates by conducting thermogravimetric experiments. Commonly used kinetic methods are modified to estimate kinetics parameters, and a more realistic range of conversion rates is used. The results demonstrate that low temperature oxidation (LTO) dominates for light oil but fuel deposition (FD) and high temperature oxidation (HTO) dominate for heavy oil. The region of transition intervals in both LTO & FD and FD & HTO should be avoided to get more accurate kinetics parameters. Quartz sands are used to provide a large surface area, which result in decreasing the estimated activation energy of LTO for light oil by 15%, whereas the FD and HTO of heavy oil are enhanced by 11.7% and 14.1%, resulting in enhancing oil recovery (EOR). These results improve the understanding of the oxidation of different crude oils over the whole range of temperatures and have broad applicability to improving the design of air injection based on EOR projects. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.