Improved yield is built on sand

摘要

Acollaboration between scientists in Wales and Iran has found that microscopic sand particles could help improve the yield of oil from difficult-to-exploit resources. The researchers, from the Energy Safety Research Institute (ESRI) at Swansea University and the Islamic Azad University in Iran, are working on enhanced oil recovery (EOR), a technique that involves extracting oil from wells where most of the resources have already been removed. This is often done by pumping other substances into the well to displace the remaining oil, which is sometimes bound to the underground rock formations.