Enhanced Oil Recovery By Surfactant and Brine Flooding

Abstract

It is well known to the art of oil recovery technique that only a fraction of the original oil in place can be recovery by primary recovery method. This method allows oil to flow to the surface by means of natural energy forces and pressure. Most of reservoirs, the recovery can slightly be improved by mean of water flooding method. This method is among the famous methods used as secondary oil recovery technique which is inexpensive and available in most of the places around the world, but this technique has its own weakness, water does not displace oil efficiently as it passes through the formation pores, because water and oil are immiscible to each other hence they create high interfacial tension between them. Thus a better method or used of chemical agents that reduce the interfacial tension between fluids is necessary to be used in order to obtain a better oil recovery.

The study and use of different surface active agents like surfactant in order to lower the surface tension between water and oil has brought new challenges to the art of oil recovery techniques, this bring us to atertiary oil recovery method, but this technique comes with more improve in oil recovery compare to both primary and secondary recovery methods. The reason behind is that, the injected of fluid that contain surface active agents can penetrate and pass through rock formation much ease than the water alone, therefore making it much easier to push the oil out from its pores and up to the surface.

The purpose of the project is to evaluate the efficient of the surfactant developed by SINTEF for enhanced oil recovery using glass beads and compare their results with that of recovery by brine flooding and the numerical simulated recovery. This work, reports the results of a comprehensive experimental study on oil recovery by injection of brine and surfactant at different concentration using glass beads as porousmedia. Results show that a significant amount of trapped oil due to brine flooding could be recovered by surfactant. It was clear that the efficient of surfactant was much better on oil recovery as the surfactant concentration increase, and hence these results demonstrate a rapid and meaningful tertiary recovery method for determination of enhanced oil recovery (EOR).