Transcripción del resumen del autor. One method to access unconventional, heavy-oil resources is to apply in-situ combustion (ISC) to oxidize in place a small fraction of the hydrocarbon thereby providing heat to reduce oil viscosity and pressure that enhances recovery. ISC is also attractive because it provides the opportunity to upgrade oil in-situ by increasing the API gravity and decreasing, for instance, sulfur content. Experimental analysis of crude-oil oxidation kinetics provides parameters, such as activation energy, for modeling and optimization of ISC processes. The complex nature of petroleum as a mixture and multistep character of oxidation reactions complicates substantially the kinetic analysis of crude oil. Isoconversional techniques provide model-free methods for estimating activation energy and naturally deconvolve multi-step reactions. In this sense, they are superior to the conventional methods of analysis of crude oil oxidation kinetics. Isoconversional methods are also useful as a diagnostic tool to recognize the burning characteristics of different oils. Our work shows that different phenomena, such as "cool flames";, can be identified by using isoconversional analysis. The combustion kinetics of three oil samples are reported adding to the knowledge base of crude-oil combustion and the applicability of isoconversional analysis to oil oxidation is tested experimentally. In addition synthetic examples are presented to show the diagnostic characteristics of the analysis.

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