Assessment of oil recovery enhancement through surfactant flooding; Experimental and feasibility studies

Abstract

Chemical flooding is one of the major enhanced oil recovery (EOR) techniques particularly for reservoirs where thermal methods are not applicable, that chemical flooding may be polymer flooding, alkaline flooding, surfactant flooding, or a combination of them. The application of designing a chemical flooding program is strongly affected by the current economics, reservoir oil type, and crude oil price. In this project, mechanisms of different chemical methods will be discussed, and design chemical flooding program by using a laboratory scale and programming method. This project is mainly about making a design of surfactant flooding program, through choosing the optimum surfactant concentration. Also, economic study is very important in designing the program to know if the project is profitable or not to identify its efficiency, and choosing the better type of surfactant flooding in the reservoir. The results of this project proved that the surfactant has good effect on rock wettability to more water- wet, so increase the hydrocarbon recovery. Keywords: Surfactant flooding; Enhanced Oil Recovery; Economic profit