The industry partner, Cantest is establishing a new leak detection procedure for analyzing data sources in aboveground storage tanks and statistical learning models to monitor AST shell dynamics and product activity over time. This is an important problem as identifying leak detection is usually associated with various environmental data and records collected from sensitive sensors […]

In-situ bitumen/heavy oil recovery using hot steam is very energy-intensive with high level of greenhouse gases emission. Solvent-steam co-injection not only reduced the steam consumption but also improve the oil recovery through the dilution and in-situ upgrading of bitumen. The success of macro-scale recovery is significantly affected by micro-scale phenomena. Commercial reservoir simulators are not […]

This Mitacs project will enable two MSc students the opportunity to work with the Offshore Energy Research Association and their partners with the Nova Scotia Department of Energy to produce an ArcGIS product and seismic-based model of seep architecture for petroleum exploration of the offshore Nova Scotia margin. These projects will relate newly created genomic […]

Olefins are unsaturated hydrocarbon molecules that are commonly formed as by-products during the fluid catalytic cracking of heavy crude oils. The presence of olefins in upgraded oil feedstocks is highly undesirable as their intrinsic instability means that decomposition is facile and results in the formation of a variety of unwanted compounds that devalue the upgraded […]

In case of an oil spill in a marine environment, an important aspect of an early response is to confine the oil spill and prevents it from getting dispersed. The objective of this master thesis project is to contribute to better understand the stability of a liquid/liquid flow subjected to imposed shear, as a toy […]

The proposed production optimizer uses production (rate, water/oil ratio, pressure) data, in either isolation or with geological data, and artificial intelligence to determine limiting factors in wells and fields. More specifically, the proposed production optimizer determines Original Oil in Place (OOIP), average permeability, permeability distribution, and relative permeability for wells and, by extension, reservoirs. This […]

The proposed research is focused on designing and optimizing novel catalysts that catalyze the activation of methane, the principal component of natural gas, to upgrade heavy oil, and obtaining a comprehensive understanding of the involved reaction mechanism. Heavy oil is upgraded to meet the pipeline transportation requirements, while methane is incorporated to the formed synthetic […]

Foamy oil behavior is a unique phenomenon associated with cold production of heavy crude oils. It is believed that the foaming mechanism has a significant impact on the abnormally high production rate of viscous crude oils observed in many heavy oil producing reservoirs through solution gas drive. Due to the non-equilibrium nature of the foamy […]

The goal of this research is to investigate the extension of upscaling and multiscale methods and their application to efficiently simulate (frequency-dependent and time-dependent) electromagnetic fields in geophysical scenarios that include metallic-cased boreholes and fractures filled with conductive/resistive fluids. Simulating this type of geophysical settings is quite challenging because they consider highly heterogeneous media and […]

Dispersion of various solutes in porous media has been investigated experimentally and theoretically for different scientific purposes. The study of this phenomenon can provide fundamental knowledge of solvent (or gas) flooding in enhanced oil recovery, groundwater contamination, and catalyst-based chemical processes.

Based on the original Statistical Inventory Reconciliation(SIR) Test Method (Quantitative), K-folds cross validation is used to increase P(D) and decrease P(FA) by adjusting K, which are related to bias and standard deviation. There is a trade-off between bias and variance, with very flexible models (overfit) having low bias and high variance, and relatively rigid models(underfit) […]

While technologies exist for cleaning up marine oil spills, they become decreasingly effective with increased lag-time between spill and initiation of remediation efforts. Rapid-deploy chemicals could potentially reduce the spreading of marine oil spills, increasing the time available for teams to clean it up. The hybrid spill-treating agents (STAs) under development by BC Research Inc. […]