Development of digital oil for technological innovation in petroleum engineering

Abstract

Engineering science largely relies on a fundamental understanding on the structure-property relationships at various spatial and time scales. Digital oil is a molecular model of crude oil that is represented by multiple representative molecules created based on analytical data. This concept was proposed by our group in 2014 inspired by the concepts of digital field and digital rock, which emerged, historically, in the oil industry as critical technical revolutions. For five years, my colleagues and I have been working on digital oil and constructed two types of light crude oil as well as two types of heavy crude oil models with one being oil sand bitumen. So far, the applications include: （1） predicting asphaltene precipitation,（ 2） better solutions to asphaltene problems, and（ 3） heavy oil development. For heavy oil, we developed the method for constructing molecular models of saturates and aromatics. To predict phase behavior, we are working on a coarse-grained digital oil model. Digital oil builds a bridge between basic petroleum chemistry and engineering via molecular simulation techniques. We believe that this technique will be widely used for solving problems in both upstream and downstream in oil industry.