A Feasibility Study of the Integration of Enhanced Oil Recovery (CO2 Flooding) with CO2 Storage in the Mature Oil Fields of the Ordos Basin, China

AbstractRich in energy resources, China's Ordos Basin Shares many similarities with Wyoming's Powder River Basin. As a result, the experience and expertise pertaining to energy development in the Powder River Basin should prove helpful in the Ordos Basin. The b reserves are ranked fourth. The coal deposits in the Ordos Basin account for 39 percent of total Chinese coal reserves (3.98 trillion tonnes), and six of the thirteen largest coal mines in China are located in the basin. The overlapping development of relatively new coal conversion industries with existing oil and gas industries in northern Shaanxi Province is creating an opportunity to apply the systematic approach developed in Wyoming: the integration of geological CO2 storage and CO2-EOR. The coal conversion industry (i.e., coal-to-methanol, coal-to-olefins, etc.) provides affordable, capture-ready CO2 sources for developing large-scale integrated CO2-EOR and carbon storage projects in the Ordos Basin, China. Compared with other CCUS projects, the ability to use CO2 from the coal- conversion industry for CO2-EOR and subsequent geological CO2 storage will make integrated projects in the Ordos Basin more cost-effective and technologically efficient.The low porosity, low permeability, low oil saturation, anomalously low reservoir pressure, and high reservoir heterogeneity of the target storage formations in the Ordos Basin make using CO2 for enhanced oil recovery much more challenging here than in the US. These reservoir characteristics together constitute a major reason that CO2- EOR is not widely employed in the Ordos Basin, even though sources of highly concentrated CO2 (coal conversion plants) have been available for years. Comparisons of reservoir and crude oil properties in the Ordos Basin with the current US CO2-EOR screening guidelines reveal that gravity, viscosity, crude oil composition, and formation type of the Ordos reservoirs all are favorable for CO2 miscible flooding. The major challenges in deploying EOR result from anomalously low reservoir pressure, low porosity, and higher reservoir heterogeneity

Preparation and Characteristic of PC/PLA/TPU Blends by Reactive Extrusion

To overcome the poor toughness of PC/PLA blends due to the intrinsic properties of materials and poor compatibility, thermoplastic urethane (TPU) was added to PC/PLA blends as a toughener; meantime, catalyst di-n-butyltin oxide (DBTO) was also added for catalyzing transesterification of components in order to modify the compatibility of blends. The mechanical, thermal, and rheological properties of blends were investigated systematically. The results showed that the addition of TPU improves the toughness of PC/PLA blends significantly, with the increase of TPU, the elongation at break increases considerably, and the impact strength increases firstly and then falls, while the tensile strength decreases significantly and the blends exhibit a typical plastic fracture behavior. Meantime, TPU is conducive to the crystallinity of PLA in blends which is inhibited seriously by PC and damages the thermal stability of blends slightly. Moreover, the increased TPU makes the apparent viscosity of blends melt decrease due to the well melt fluidity of TPU; the melt is closer to the pseudoplasticity melt. Remarkably, the transesterification between the components improves the compatibility of blends significantly, and more uniform structure results in a higher crystallinity and better mechanical properties

Entanglement of single-photons and chiral phonons in atomically thin WSe2_2

Quantum entanglement is a fundamental phenomenon which, on the one hand, reveals deep connections between quantum mechanics, gravity and the space-time; on the other hand, has practical applications as a key resource in quantum information processing. While it is routinely achieved in photon-atom ensembles, entanglement involving the solid-state or macroscopic objects remains challenging albeit promising for both fundamental physics and technological applications. Here, we report entanglement between collective, chiral vibrations in two-dimensional (2D) WSe$_2$ host --- chiral phonons (CPs) --- and single-photons emitted from quantum dots (QDs) present in it. CPs which carry angular momentum were recently observed in WSe$_2$ and are a distinguishing feature of the underlying honeycomb lattice. The entanglement results from a "which-way" scattering process, involving an optical excitation in a QD and doubly-degenerate CPs, which takes place via two indistinguishable paths. Our unveiling of entanglement involving a macroscopic, collective excitation together with strong interaction between CPs and QDs in 2D materials opens up ways for phonon-driven entanglement of QDs and engineering chiral or non-reciprocal interactions at the single-photon level