OREANDA-NEWS   Employees of Kazan Federal University (KFU) have come up with a new technology that will allow extracting high-viscosity oil from great depths, this development is already being tested in practice, the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation told RIA Novosti.

Reserves of high-viscosity heavy oil are an important component of the raw material base of the Russian oil industry. However, such oil is difficult to process, since due to its high viscosity it is difficult to pump it from the reservoir, besides it flows poorly through the well.

The idea of CFU scientists is to use so-called in-situ catalysts containing metal in combination with microwave radiation (microwave field) during the extraction of such oil. The injection of such catalysts into the reservoir allows to increase oil recovery and reduce the carbon footprint due to intra-layer refining of oil, in which the transformation of the composition of heavy oil under the action of catalysts leads to a decrease in high-molecular components and an increase in oil mobility, explained a leading researcher at the research laboratory "Intra-layer Gorenje" Institute of Geology and Oil and Gas Technologies (IGiNGT) CFU Alexey Vakhin. KFU scientists have developed several catalysts, mainly iron-nickel.

According to the researcher, the use of in-situ catalysts makes it possible to extract high-viscosity oil from a depth of up to one kilometer. In order to be able to extract such oil from deeper layers, KFU scientists have developed a technology called microwave aquathermolysis, which allows to effectively reduce the viscosity of heavy oil.