In-Situ Heavy Oil Aquathermolysis in the Presence of Nanodispersed Catalysts Based on Transition Metals

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The manuscript sums up in-situ methods of upgrading fossile heavy fuels. Its special value lies in the fact, that also papers in russian language are cited, which are closed to the international due to the lack of language knowledge. However the text needs a general revision in its structure. It starts with an introduction, but where is the beginning of the main part ???? Not only the main paragraphs are missing, even sub-topics or sub-paragraphs are needed. In the actual version the authors jump from one topic to the other, the reader wants the information more structured, otherwise he won’t read up to the end. Apropos end: Where are the conclusions ??? (If there are none, then maybe the content of the manuscript is irrelevant?) The figures help very much to understand the text, but many seem to be copied from older origins in paper form, I strongy advise to redraw it and to change their layout in order to abide the copyrights. And please: The text need a careful revision of language by a native speaker !!! And the formate of the citations has to be adjusted according to the international standard.

 

Now my points in detail, line by line: see the attachment (review-kazan.docx)

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

We highly appreciate the reviewers’ insightful and helpful comments on our

manuscript. We apologize for significant mistakes/typos we made. Many sentences of the manuscript have been carefully rewritten or reorganized to enhance the logic flow and make the statements stricter in a proper tone. Several statements and paragraphs that we made were more ambiguous than intended. We have adjusted the text to be clear. There was no Russian language papers cited throughout the manuscript, all Russian sources are both in English and Russian languages. However, several corrections were made in «References». The main part and conclusion remarks were added. In response to the graphical abstract, we have changed according to your request. All the necessary copyrights permissions exist and were sent to editors.  

 

Comment 1: line 30-31: It seems that in reference [1] there is information about the fossil resources in Russia, but it is a paper about difficult fossile sources. Maybe the right reference but at the wrong place?

 

Response: Thank you for pointing this. There was information about the heavy oil resources of Russia in the reference [1], but it seems difficult for readers to reach that, as the major part of paper is indeed devoted to unconventional resources. Therefore, we changed the reference to the relevant source, where heavy oil is directly mentioned.

 

Comment 2: lines 47-50: I don’t find reference [3] mentioned in the text. Just forgotten? The same is true for reference [7]. By the way, what do you mean by „suband“???? You probably mean „suband supercritical water“ and not „suband“ water.

 

Response: Some references were indeed forgotten. We have added them in the text. «suband supercritical water» was a misstype. We have changed it into «sub- and supercritical water»

 

Comment 3: lines 48 and 54: You probably don’t like english verbs combined with prepositions: It is „result in“ and „carry out“, though „carry on“ also exists, but the meaning is different. I am

not sure which meaning you like to use, so please check.

 

Response: Your suggestion is very valuable. Some prepositions were added to the verbs or adjusted.

 

Comment 4: line 56: „a“ is the indefinite artice singular, „bonds“ is plural, this does not fit. I stop now with these minor grammatical errors, but there seem to be a lot, so please check carefully and let a native speaker or professional do the language corrections, I limit myself now to chemical and engineering topics.

 

Response: We truly hope that the grammar-checked manuscript is now revised enough for the reviewer to take the next step. Thanks. We deeply appreciate your help on improving the readability of our paper.

 

Comment 5: line 57: In fig 1 I see only a sulfide bond (C-S-C). A disulfide bond is C-S-S-C.

 

Response: We fully agree that sulfide bonds and disulfide bonds are not the same and require different energies to be cracked. But to the best of our knowledge, C-S-S-C is much weaker than C-S-C and the latter is cracked much earlier than the former. However, we accept the comment and we have replaced the «disulfide» with «sulfide» in the text.

 

Comment 6: fig. 1: Please: A chemical reaction is connected with an arrow! That’s a generally accepted convention and you should follow this ! (I confess that the reaction is written in this way in the literature. I am a chemist and I really feel sick when I see such things in scientific quality journals! legend of fig. 1: I fully understand „Intensification of aquathermolysis reactions by dispersed catalysts“, but what do you mean by „background of asphaltene fragment“?

 

Response: We agree with this and adjusted the figure 1. By „background of asphaltene fragment is adapted from [1]“ we mean that the background of the asphaltene fragment used in Figure 1 was adopted from the literature. This sentence was added to avoid the plagiarism. But from your comments I understood that significant modifications done to the original figures abide the copyright permissions. Therefore, we removed the statement „background of asphaltene fragment is adapted from [1]“.

 

Comment 7: line 62: The catalyst particles retain on the surface --> The catalyst particles are retained on the surface; line 66: strange language, my suggestion: The C-S bond breaks down and opens up the ring resulting in the formation of low-molecular alkanes and alkenes (Fig. 2.); line 87: thermobaric; line 92: please leave out the psig value, superfluous; line 98: are suffering from hydrogen; line 106: In an international scientific journal with international background, the classification „foreign“ makes no sense because the demestic reference is missing; line 164: „Another researchers implies that cyclohexane is more effective that molecular hydrogen in terms of decreasing coke content“. --> „Other researchers imply that cyclohexane is more effective in terms of decreasing coke content.“; line 238: specters --> spectra; line 247: Reney Nickel --> Naney Nickel; lines 307-319: The quality of the language gets worse and worse did anybody read for correction before me ?????; lines 330 + 334: Explain the abbreviation EOR;

 

Response: We appreciate the time and effort that you have provided. Regarding the above comments, all spelling and grammatical errors pointed out by the reviewers have been corrected.

 

 Comment 8: fig. 5: The quality of this figure must be increased ! By the way, many figures look like copied from anywhere, does the copyright exist in every case? Otherwise you have to redraw with significant changes.

 

Response: The high-resolution image was downloaded from the original paper and replaced. All the copyright permissions exist.

 

Comment 9: line 242: What are „ordinary“ carbons ??? synonym for primary? never heard of ordinary carbon.

 

Response: It is a synonym for primary carbons. We have replaced «ordinary» with «primary» throughout the manuscript.

 

Comment 10:  line 284: What are CSC conditions???? Wikipedia shows about 50 abbreviations, none of them fits. Of course, you cite the paper with the relevant information, but your manuscript should be understandable even without reading the references. (O.K., now I now: „catalytic steam cracking“, but I just know because I read the literature, not because I found it in your manuscript!)

 

Response: CSC stands for «Catalytic steam cracking» and was revised when using for the first time in the text.

 

Comment 11: fig. 8: Please describe this figure in more detail in the text. My concern (please improve):Cm-1Hn-2 + CO --> H2 ist indeed a chemical reaction, but neither WGS, nor a reaction with a correct mass balance. By the way: H2 --> saturated hydrocarbon is also not possible. What

you probably mean is Cm-1Hn-2 + CO + H2O ---> (via water-gas-shift reaction and

hydrogenation) saturated hydrocarbon + CO2

 

Response: We are fully agree with reviewer if it was only the reaction. In our review article the figure was adopted from the journal of Energy and Fuels and there are lots of figures in the journal of Processes as well, where such arrows are used to explain the mechanisms and reaction paths. On the other hand, we have copyright from the authors of the original paper and citation exists. Unfortunately, we have no right to edit the figures, the reviewer can kindly refer to Betiha M.A.

 

Comment 12:  fig. 9: (a), (b), .....(h) is irrelevant, if you don’t explain anything of this in the legend or in the text.

 

Response: The descriptions were written above each image. Maybe they were very small to read and hence, we added the same description in the figure’s caption.

 

Comment 13: legend of fig. 10: Where is (a) and (b) in the figure? You explain something in the legend, what does nit exist in the figure.

 

Response: The (a) and (b) were just forgotten, we added.

 

The remaining comments of reviewer 1 regarding the format and references were corrected. In addition to the above comments, all spelling and grammatical errors pointed out by the reviewers have been corrected and we truly hope that the revised manuscript is now clarified enough for the reviewer to take the next step. Thanks. We deeply appreciate your help on improving the readability of our paper.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript was written in an essay format and not in a scientific article format. The authors are advised to carefully divide the manuscript into subsections for easy comprehension of the readers. Also, there are alot of grammatical errors in the manuscript which makes it very hard to understand what the authors were trying to say 

Comments for author File: Comments.docx

Author Response

We are grateful to the reviewer for insightful comments on our paper. We have been able to revise the manuscript according to the peer-review requirements. The abstract was totally rewritten considering the objective of the study and now it is different from the introductionary part. WE fully agree with reviewer regarding the interchangeably using terms such as «heavy oil» and «heavy crude oil». We stick on the term «heavy oil» throughout the manuscript in order to not confuse the readers.

 

Line 41; ‘The specific features of composition and properties…’ This phrase is tautology. Features and properties are the same thing. The authors should rewrite as ‘Due to the poor properties of heavy crude oil alongside the challenges facing oil recovery methods, there is a need for technological solutions that can address…’

 

Response: Thank you for pointing this out. We agree with this comment and have revised the statement as you suggested «Due to the poor properties of heavy crude oil alongside the challenges facing oil recovery methods, there is a need for technological solutions that can address »

 

Line 50: Two articles are not enough to cite as ‘increasing number of studies’. The authors are advised to cite 4-5 articles

 

Response: We fully agree and therefore we have added some more citations.

 

 Line 58: There is nowhere ‘fig 1’ was shown in the manuscript. Kindly rewrite as ‘Figure 1’ and effect similar changes throughout the manuscript. Figure 1 heading is totally different from what you were writing in the previous statement. I am not sure what is the essence of the figure to the statement. Going by the figure heading, you are referring to aquathermolysis reaction by dispersed catalysts, however, the preceding statement where the figure was mentioned, was talking about influence of resins and asphaltenes on oil viscosity reduction and increase in oil recovery.

 

Response: The way of representing captions and indicating the figures in the text are revised throughout the manuscript. The figure 1 is a proposed mechanism of catalytic aquathermolysis process. The further discussion of Figure 1 is carried out in the revised manuscript.

 

Line 55 – 58: These are scientific statements of facts, but you did not cite the sources where these pieces of information were gotten. Kindly provide citations for these statements

 

Response: The required citations were provided

Line 68 – 70: Kindly correct the Font size

Response: The Font size was corrected.

 

Line 76: Rewrite Usa as USA

Response: It is not United States of America, but the name of oil reservoir in Russia Federation. However, in order to not confuse the readers, we changed it.

 

In addition to the above comments, all spelling and grammatical errors pointed out by the reviewers have been corrected and we truly hope that the revised manuscript is now clarified enough for the reviewer to take the next step. Thanks. We deeply appreciate your help on improving the readability of our paper.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Thank you for your detailed answer to my comments, this was accelerating significantly my check !

The only disappointing fact is, that maybe they've put more structure in the text now than before, but they avoided to help the reader by implementing subheading. The main part of the paper ( > 90%) is just "chaper 2", what not introduce smaller subchapters "2.1, 2.2, 2.3"?

Author Response

Thank you for your time and effort. We fully agree with implementing subheadings in the following order «2.Catalytic aquathermolysis; 2.1. Use of Hydrogen donors; 2.2. Use of aquathermolysis catalysts; 2.2.1. Nanocatalysts; 2.2.2. Water-soluble catalysts; 2.2.3. Oil-soluble catalysts; 2.2.4. Rock minerals; 2.3. Field tests of catalytic aqauthermolysis»

Reviewer 2 Report

There are still some minor revisions to be done to fully get the manuscript to the point where the reader(s) will be able to fully grasp the essence of the article. These are highlighted in the attached file for the authors

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

RESPONSE TO REVIEWER 2

We highly appreciate the reviewer’s spent time, effort and helpful comments on our manuscript.

 Objective of the study: While the author mentioned the objective of this manuscript in the abstract, it is still meant to be mentioned in the introduction.

Response: The objective of this manuscript was added both in abstract, as well as in introduction part upon your request already in previous revised version of manuscript. In abstract «Hence, the catalytic aquathermolysis process as a distinct process can be applied as a successful method to enhance oil recovery. The objective of this study is to review all previously published lab scale and pilot experimental data, various reaction schemes and field observations on in-situ catalytic aquathermolysis process». In Introduction section «Thus, the catalytic aquathermolysis process provides not only feasible enhancement of heavy oil recovery, but also contributes to its further transportation and refinery by changing the quality of difficult-to refine feedstock in-place. This paper sheds new light on the process of upstream heavy oil aquathermolysis in the presence of transition metal-based catalysts».

 Furthermore, there is still need to subdivide the ‘2. Catalytic aquathermolysis’ into subdivisions

(e.g mechanism of catalytic aquathermolysis, factors affecting catalytic aquathermolysis, etc.).

Response: We fully agree with reviewers regarding subdividing the main part of manuscript. Upon the recommendation of both reviewers, we subdivided the main body – «2.Catalytic aquathermolysis» into «2.1. Use of Hydrogen donors; 2.2. Use of aquathermolysis catalysts; 2.2.1. Nanocatalysts; 2.2.2. Water-soluble catalysts; 2.2.3. Oil-soluble catalysts; 2.2.4. Rock minerals; 2.3. Field tests of catalytic aqauthermolysis»   

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf