Dr. Prem Bikkina

Dr. Prem Bikkina, associate professor of chemical engineering at Oklahoma State University, is a member of the OK NSF EPSCoR Track-1 RII Award titled Socially Sustainable Solutions for Water, Carbon, and Infrastructure Resilience in Oklahoma. The $20 million research project is a social science-led, multi-disciplinary collaboration among social, physical, biological, engineering, and computational scientists. More than thirty researchers from across the state are working together on the project, which began July 1, 2020.

Dr. Bikkina's research supports the project's Focus Area 3: Variable and Marginal Quality Water Supplies (V-MQW). The V-MQW Supplies focus area addresses issues surrounding Oklahoma’s water demands, which are projected to increase 600,000 acre-feet per year between 2007-2060. Reliable water supplies are needed to provide for these demands while meeting the state’s goal of capping freshwater use to 2010 levels. However, freshwater supplies are declining due to reservoir sedimentation and groundwater overdraft and are increasingly vulnerable to S2S variability. Concurrently, volumes of oil and gas ‘produced water,’ municipal wastewater, and stormwater are increasing with continued oil and gas development and urbanization. Disposal of produced waters has been correlated with seismicity, potentially impacting infrastructure and resulting in energy production curtailment in some regions. The challenge is finding a mix of solutions that allow Oklahoma’s diverse array of MQW to be economically treated for beneficial use to address water scarcity related to changing seasonal to subseasonal weather patterns, waste disposal, and infrastructure risk while supporting continued energy production and economic growth. 

Dr. Bikkina's Major Areas of Research

• Interfacial phenomena relevant to geological sequestration and enhanced oil recovery (EOR)
• Microfluidics based EOR using ASP, WAG, CO₂ and CO₂ foams
• Wettability-based dissolved gas separation and nucleate boiling
• Geo-material microfluidics

The OK NSF EPSCoR Track-1 Project

To support this research, Dr. Bikkina and his team will develop and test high salinity carbonated produced water flooding technology that can serve the purposes of enhanced oil recovery (EOR), carbon sequestration, and produced water disposal. This unique approach is intended to address three critical needs of the world: supply of sustainable and effective EOR fluids; provide safe and economic disposal of produced water; and provide safe and economic sequestration of CO₂. Towards this objective, a fundamental experimental investigation will be performed to: (1) Select the compositions of the high salinity carbonated produced water-based on stability, and bulk and interfacial properties; (2) Experimentally investigate temporal evolution of rock and fluid properties, petrophysics, and rock/fluid interactions from atomic to core scales; and (3) Evaluate the EOR potential of the high salinity carbonated produced water flooding technology from pore to core scale at reservoir conditions.

Learn more about the OK NSF EPSCoR research project.