Laboratory Study on the Oil Displacement Properties of Sugar Amine Sulfonate Surfactant

Abstract

A sugar amine sulfonate surfactant (SAS) was used to enhance oil recovery by chemical flooding. The interfacial tension between an SAS solution and four kinds of crude oil was determined. Oil (4) containing the largest amount of medium chain length components was the most suitable candidate because the IFT could be reduced to an ultralow range (10−3 mN/m) at optimum NaCl concentration. Emulsions consisting of oil (4) and SAS solution and the adsorption density of SAS on sandstone were studied. Compared with A37 (alkyl ether sulfate), SAS ws able to form more stable emulsions and the adsorption density was equivalent in the typical concentration range of chemical flooding. Both SAS and A37 adsorption data on sandstone followed the Langmuir isotherm model. SAS increased the apparent viscosity of KY‐1500 (modified polyacrylamide) in a low concentration range and improve the viscoelasticity. A combination of SAS and KY‐1500 (SP) enhanced oil recovery by 16.05 versus 14.31% (using KY‐1500 alone).

Mini-review: Synthetic methods for the production of cationic sugar-based surfactants

“…Regarding anionic sugarbased surfactants their synthesis also seems to be sorted out -they can be produced through the incorporation of different functional groups like sulfonate, carboxylate and phosphate, in nonionic sugar-based surfactants. The synthetic route for these has been described with two or more steps [18,[32][33][34][35][36]. The chemical route of cationic sugar-based surfactants occurs frequently in two or more steps, equally to the anionic surfactants.…”

Salt‐Induced Constructions of Gemini‐like Surfactants at the Interface and Their Effects on the Interfacial Tension of a Water/Model Oil System

“…Surfactants can effectively mobilize residual oil by reducing the interfacial tension (IFT) between the displacement fluid and crude oil in chemical-enhanced oil recovery (EOR) (Hirasaki et al, 2011;Kamal et al, 2017). Many groups have investigated the development of novel highperformance surfactants, such as biosurfactants (Ahmadi et al, 2014;Jia et al, 2017a;Pu et al, 2017), gemini surfactants (Kamal, 2016;Zhou et al, 2018), zwitterionic surfactants (Cao et al, 2016;Cui et al, 2012;Zheng et al, 2017), surface-active ionic liquids (Rodriguez-Escontrela et al, 2017;Zhou et al, 2016), and other novel surfactants (Karambeigi et al, 2015;Liyanage et al, 2015;Pal et al, 2016;Zhou et al, 2017a). Kamal summarized the unique properties of gemini surfactants in EOR, such as good water solubility, low critical micelle concentration, unusual aggregation behavior, interesting rheological properties, and high efficiency in reducing oil/water IFT (Kamal, 2016).…”