Erdal Ozkan
Colorado School of Mines, CO·Engineering
Injecting carbon dioxide (CO2) underground could do two jobs at once. It could squeeze more oil out of hard-to-produce "tight" rock formations, and it could store CO2 so it stays out of the atmosphere.
- Fields
Engineering
Earth & Environmental Science
Physics
- Topics
nanofluidics
CO2 sequestration
carbon capture and storage
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Dec 2026
What they work on
- Test whether CO2 at oil-wall interfaces and its gradient along pore walls control oil-CO2 transport in nanopores, using membrane and real rock core experiments with molecular and continuum simulations.
- Explain the diffusion-driven exchange between oil trapped in nanopores and CO2 in fractures, including diffusio-osmosis, interlayer slippage and surface diffusion.
- Add nanofluidic physics to an industry-standard reservoir simulator to measure how it affects oil recovery and CO2 storage at the reservoir scale.
More about the research
In US tight oil reservoirs, most pores are only nanometers wide, and oil recovery is low. Engineers find it hard to optimize CO2 injection because no one fully understands how oil and CO2 flow through such tiny pores. That uncertainty carries over into reservoir-scale predictions. This industry-partnered project aims to uncover this nanoscale flow physics and its effects on oil recovery and CO2 storage.
Why it matters
More reliable models of CO2 flow in tight oil reservoirs could help petroleum engineers design operations that recover more oil while storing CO2 underground at lower cost. Insights into how mixtures move through nanometer-scale spaces could also inform water purification and mineral extraction. Industry researchers will receive newsletters on this pore-scale work.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Yashar Mehmani
Pennsylvania State University, PA·Engineering·Early-career
Map the regimes that determine whether volume-expanding mineral growth cracks porous rock open, exposing fresh reactive surface, or instead seals the pore space, using bench-scale experiments with microscale models coupling flow, reaction and fracture.
Scott Milner
Pennsylvania State University, PA·Engineering
Develop an integrated method combining constant-potential density functional theory (DFT) and classical molecular dynamics with a full electrochemical double layer to predict activation barriers of proton-electron transfer steps at electrodes.
Mohammad Rahimi
University of Houston, TX·Engineering·Early-career
Engineer soft liquid-liquid interfaces between two immiscible electrolyte solutions that separate CO2 electrochemically without costly ion-selective membranes and with less sensitivity to oxygen gas.
The school
Colorado School of Mines: 4 labs on PI Pages, $110M a year on research, 124 research doctorates a year.
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