Controlled delivery and release of surfactant for enhanced oil recovery by nanodroplets

Abstract

Chemical-based oil recovery method has promising applications but suffers the problem of large quantity of chemical loss inside the reservoir. This work proposes an innovative concept of using nanodroplets as carriers for surfactants/polymers and control their release inside porous media to increase oil recovery in water-wet reservoirs. Comparing to conventional surfactant flooding, the proposed concept could not only reduce the adsorption of surfactant on rock surface, but also ease the problem of unstable surfactant slug injection and release surfactant slowly inside a reservoir.The oil recovery efficiency was evaluated for micelles and nanodroplet forms of surfactants blend in a customized core flooding system and the differential pressures were monitored to evaluate the injection stability of flooding fluids. The retention of surfactants was analyzed by highperformance liquid chromatography after the core flooding tests. The experiments confirm the advantages of nanodroplets as surfactant carriers. The results show that the new approach promoted tertiary oil recovery around ~8%, while reducing the adsorption of surfactants almost half on the surface of sandstone rock comparing to the micelle form.

Experimental investigation, binary modelling and artificial neural network prediction of surfactant adsorption for enhanced oil recovery application

“…HPLC system was connected to Evaporative Light Scattering Detector (ELSD) which is a universal detector that is used for the majority of surfactants [77] , [78] . The Thermo Scientific acclaim surfactant plus column (Dionex bonded silica (3 μ, 3.0 × 150nm)) was used for the analysis in this study with high sensitivity and high productivity [79] , [80] . An example of the corresponding peaks of APG and AEC in the obtained chromatogram from HPLC are demonstrated in the supplementary materials (Appendix I).…”

Bad metallic transport in a cold atom Fermi-Hubbard system

“…Further experimental studies will also provide important benchmarks for approximate theoretical methods, as the combination of low temperature, finite-doping, and dynamics is challenging for exact theoretical approaches. [39][40][41][42].…”

Sulfonated Polystyrene Nanoparticles as Oleic Acid Diethanolamide Surfactant Nanocarriers for Enhanced Oil Recovery Processes

“…Sulfonate groups are present in many known surfactants such as sodium dodecylbenzene sulfonate (SDBS) which have been applied to enhanced oil recovery [11,12,13]. Besides, some other studies [31,39,40,41] showed that these groups have an influence on the polymerization reaction and the obtained particle sizes.…”

“…To overcome this disadvantage, systems have been developed in order to stabilize surfactant molecules [5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17]. For example, Pei et al showed that O/W emulsion injection containing nanoparticles and surfactant can increase the tertiary oil recovery [7].…”

“…Microemulsions were obtained with hexane/brine systems with SDS and SPAM 80 as surfactants and were employed in core-flooding experiments. The results did show a reduction of surfactant adsorption and an increase in oil recovery efficiency [13].…”