New surfactant developments for chemical enhanced oil recovery

Lu, Jun; Liyanage, Pathma Jith; Solairaj, Sriram; Adkins, Stephanie; Arachchilage, Gayani Pinnawala; Kim, Do Hoon; Britton, Chris; Weerasooriya, Upali; Pope, Gary A.

doi:10.1016/j.petrol.2014.05.021

Cited by 124 publications

(63 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…Probably due to chemical interactions between the surface charges of the two surfactants and the synergetic effect, the enhancement in oil recovery was greater when the two surfactants were used as a mixture, rather than alone. Lu et al (2014c) reported that for oils with a high alkane carbon number, surfactants with very large hydrophobes are needed to obtain ultra-low IFT and to reduce the residual oil saturation to nearly zero. They reported new classes of large-hydrophobe surfactants developed for chemical EOR, where both the sulfates and carboxylates were tailored to specific reservoir conditions and oils by adjusting the number of ethylene oxide (EO) or propylene oxide (PO) groups in the surfactant.…”

Section: Coreflood Experiments Using Chemical Surfactant and Biosurfamentioning

confidence: 99%

Injection of biosurfactant and chemical surfactant following hot water injection to enhance heavy oil recovery

et al. 2015

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This study investigates the potential of enhancing oil recovery from a Middle East heavy oil field via hot water injection followed by injection of a chemical surfactant and/or a biosurfactant produced by a Bacillus subtilis strain which was isolated from oil-contaminated soil. The results reveal that the biosurfactant and the chemical surfactant reduced the residual oil saturation after a hot water flood. Moreover, it was found that the performance of the biosurfactant increased by mixing it with the chemical surfactant. It is expected that the structure of the biosurfactant used in this study was changed when mixed with the chemical surfactant as a probable synergetic effect of biosurfactant-chemical surfactants was observed on enhancing oil recovery, when used as a mixture, rather than alone. This work proved that it is more feasible to inject the biosurfactant as a blend with the chemical surfactant, at the tertiary recovery stage. This might be attributed to the fact that in the secondary mode, improvement of the macroscopic sweep efficiency is important, whereas in the tertiary recovery mode, the microscopic sweep efficiency matters mainly and it is improved by the biosurfactantchemical surfactant mixture. Also as evidenced by this study, the biosurfactant worked better than the chemical surfactant in reducing the residual heavy oil saturation after a hot water flood.

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Section: Coreflood Experiments Using Chemical Surfactant and Biosurfamentioning

confidence: 99%

Injection of biosurfactant and chemical surfactant following hot water injection to enhance heavy oil recovery

et al. 2015

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“…Despite these challenges, extensive laboratory research along with some field demonstration projects support the fact that there lies an enormous potential for chemicals in enhancing oil recovery from carbonate formations. With cEOR, targeting more and more challenging reservoirs, especially using surfactants is becoming a reality (Lu et al 2014a). During the last two decades, a considerable number of EOR field projects in carbonate reservoirs have been documented (Alvarado and Manrique 2010) of which the Yates field (Texas) is a good example where different EOR processes were successfully trialed at different levels, from pilot to large-scale applications.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Review of surfactant-assisted chemical enhanced oil recovery for carbonate reservoirs: challenges and future perspectives

et al. 2017

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“…To ensure the sufficient production of oil, many measures have been adopted, including exploration for discovering new oil reserves, creating national oil strategic reserve systems, and avoiding import risk based on the market fluctuations of oil futures. Enhanced oil recovery from developed reservoirs is an important strategy to face the above-described challenges [1,2]. Among various chemical flooding techniques for enhanced oil recovery, polymer flooding is especially promising.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Study on Mechanism of Viscoelastic Polymer Transient Flow in Porous Media

Zhong¹,

Zhang²,

Yin³

et al. 2017

Geofluids

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Oil recovery, including conventional and viscous oil, can be improved significantly by flooding with polymer solutions. This chemical flooding method can increase oil production, and it can improve the macrodisplacement efficiency and microsweep efficiencies. In this study, we establish physical models that include the dead-end and complex models based on the pore-network pattern etched into glass, using the snappyHexMesh solver in OpenFOAM. These models capture the complexity and topology of porous media geometry. We establish a mathematical model for transient flows of viscoelastic polymers using computational fluid dynamics simulations, and we study the distributions of pressure and velocity for different elasticity scenarios and different flooding process. The results demonstrate that the pressure difference increases as the relaxation time decreases, before the flow reaches its steady state. For a steady flow, elasticity can give rise to an additional pressure difference, which increases with increasing elasticity. Thus, the characteristics of pressure difference vary before and after the flow becomes steady; this phenomenon is very important. Velocity contours become more widely spaced with elasticity increase. This suggests that elasticity of the polymer solutions contributes to the microsweep efficiency. The results of the study provide the necessary theoretical foundation for laboratory experiments and development of methods for polymer flooding and can be helpful for the design and selection of polymers for polymer flooding.

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New surfactant developments for chemical enhanced oil recovery

Cited by 124 publications

References 23 publications

Injection of biosurfactant and chemical surfactant following hot water injection to enhance heavy oil recovery

Injection of biosurfactant and chemical surfactant following hot water injection to enhance heavy oil recovery

Review of surfactant-assisted chemical enhanced oil recovery for carbonate reservoirs: challenges and future perspectives

Study on Mechanism of Viscoelastic Polymer Transient Flow in Porous Media

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