This is the final installment in a series of three papers examining iron mineralogy and its effect on surfactant adsorption in reservoir and outcrop rock samples. The goal of these studies is to establish best practices for obtaining surfactant adsorption values representative of those in a reduced oil reservoir, despite performing experiments in an oxidizing laboratory atmosphere.This article follows two others examining the abundance and form of iron in the reservoir and in core samples (Part I: Levitt et al., 2015), and a proposed core restoration technique utilizing iron-reducing bacteria (Part II: Harris et al., 2015). In this Part III, chemical reduction methods are examined.Surfactant retention is a leading uncertainty in economic forecasting of chemical EOR, in large part due to the order-of-magnitude effects of artifacts such as improper core preservation. The industry standard is to (a) limit atmospheric contact of cores to the extent feasible, and (b) when necessary, reduce oxidized cores using strong reducing agents such as sodium dithionite, along with buffering and chelating agents such as sodium bicarbonate and EDTA or sodium citrate. However few studies have been performed to determine whether such invasive treatments are necessary, or what unintended effects the use of such reactive chemicals may have.The most striking conclusion from these studies is the lack of clear evidence of any advantage of electrochemical reduction versus a simpler treatment with chelators such as sodium citrate or EDTA. Wang (1993) suggests that oxidation of reservoir cores leads to higher surfactant adsorption due to the reduction of clays, which yields a more negative surface charge. Static experiments with montmorillonite clay, as well as an oxidized outcrop containing significant clay and iron content, illustrate that rinsing with non-reducing agents such as sodium bicarbonate, EDTA, or sodium citrate can lower adsorption as much as a strong reducing agent such as sodium dithionite. In the case of montmorillonite, cation exchange appears to be the mechanism by which adsorption is lowered, and so NaCl alone is sufficient to lower adsorption to near-zero values. For the iron-and clay-containing outcrop material, initial measurements indicating ЉadsorptionЉ far in excess of a dense bilayer were due in fact to the precipitation of sulfonate surfactant with calcium, which eluded from the dissolution of small amounts of anhydrite. An alkyl alkoxy sulfonate surfactant showed higher calcium tolerance, and did not yield ЉmultilayerЉ adsorption when equilibrated with the anhydrite-containing core sample.While treatment with a citrate-bicarbonate-dithionite solution does indeed lower adsorption several-fold further, solutions of either sodium bicarbonate or EDTA are at least as effective, and sodium citrate is almost as effective. These non-reductive treatments remove small amounts (~0.1% -~0.2% of rock mass) of Fe and Al, and fines are invariably apparent in treatment fluids, both of which suggest removal of small amounts of t...