Improving the efficiency of surfactant and polymer solutions by modifying them with nanoparticle additives to increase oil recovery

Abstract

Currently, the applicability of various nanosuspensions in the tasks of increasing oil recovery factor (ORF) is being actively investigated and numerous studies convincingly confirm their prospectiveness. At the same time, research is continuing to improve the traditional surfactant-polymer methods of flooding deposits. Combining various methods with the view to achieve a synergistic effect in increasing ORF is of great interest. This paper for the first time compares the effectiveness of diverse oil displacement fluids based on solutions of various surfactants and polymers modified with SiO₂ (10 and 45 nm), Al₂O₃ (11 nm) nanoparticles (NPs) and unique Al₂O₃ aluminum oxide nanofibers. New important data on viscosity, wettability and interfacial tension, capillary imbibition rate and oil displacement efficiency on cores and microfluidic chips for solutions modified with NPs were obtained. The influence of concentration, size and morphology of NPs on the properties of surfactant and polymer solutions important for enhancing ORF was studied. It was found that adding NPs to surfactant and polymer solutions additionally significantly improves these properties. In particular, filtration experiments on cores showed that modifying a polymer solution with SiO₂ NPs increases the ORF by 36.4 % compared to water and by 17.2 % compared to a polymer solution without NPs. The discovered positive synergistic effects in the interaction of surfactant solutions and polymers with NPs open up broad prospects for improving methods of increasing ORF during reservoir flooding.