Enhanced oil recovery by nonionic surfactants considering micellization, surface, and foaming properties

Abstract

Surfactants for enhanced oil recovery are important to study due to their special characteristics like foam generation, lowering interfacial tension between oleic and aqueous phases, and wettability alteration of reservoir rock surfaces. Foam is a good mobility control agent in enhanced oil recovery for improving the mobility ratio. In the present work, the foaming behavior of three nonionic ethoxylated surfactants, namely Tergitol 15-S-7, Tergitol 15-S-9, and Tergitol 15-S-12, was studied experimentally. Among the surfactants, Tergitol 15-S-12 shows the highest foamability. The effect of NaCl concentration and synthetic seawater on foaming behavior of the surfactants was investigated by the test-tube shaking method. The critical micelle concentrations of aqueous solutions of the different nonionic surfactants were measured at 300 K. It was found that the critical micelle concentrations of all surfactants also increased with increasing ethylene oxide number. Dynamic light scattering experiments were performed to investigate the micelle sizes of the surfactants at their respective critical micelle concentrations. Core flooding experiments were carried out in sand packs using the surfactant solutions. It was found that 22% additional oil was recovered in the case of all the surfactants over secondary water flooding. Tergitol 15-S-12 exhibited the maximum additional oil recovery which is more than 26% after water injection.

The Effects of Amide Bonds and Aromatic Rings on the Surface Properties and Antimicrobial Activity of Cationic Surfactants

“…Foams are thermodynamically unstable due to their high interfacial free energy. The stability of the foam is mainly controlled by the drain speed and intensity of the interfacial film (Bera et al, ; Xu et al, ). The foam stabilities are shown in Fig.…”

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

“…The CMC is an important aspect to study where at a concentration above the CMC’s value, the adsorption of the surfactant at the interface becomes insignificant. This indicates that the optimum reduction of surface or interfacial tension has been achieved [11] , [15] . Therefore, the selected surfactant concentration should be always above the CMC to ensure that formation of micelles, demonstrating an adequate concentration has been attained to obtain maximum efficiency in reducing IFT [16] .…”

Potential of Palm Kernel Alkanolamide Surfactant for Enhancing Oil Recovery from Sandstone Reservoir Rocks

“…However, there are some limitations to surfactant flooding techniques, such as the high cost of surfactants, surfactant loss during operation due to adsorption by reservoir rocks, and their toxicity to the environment, leading to high production costs and toxicity, especially in a sea environment (Bera et al, 2017). Thus, many studies have suggested that surfactants synthesized from natural resources could avoid the negative environmental impacts from surfactant loss during surfactant flooding, and still provide high recovery rate (Arabloo et al, 2015;Barati-Harooni et al, 2016;Iglauer et al, 2010).…”