Experimental Investigation of Viscous Surfactant Based Enhanced Oil Recovery

Abstract

Crude terephthalic acid (CTA) as a chemical compound is used for flooding here as an alternative to the traditional hydrolyzed polyacrylamide (HPAM) because of its availability and economical aspects and higher efficiency. Crude oil samples from an Iranian oil field were used during the flooding tests. Sand packed models using two different sizes of sand mainly 50 and 100 meshes were employed in this investigation. A comparison between water flooding and CTA flooding as a secondary oil recovery process revealed that the oil recovery factor was improved by 10% OOIP when CTA after water flooding was used in secondary state. The effect of various injection rates and different concentration of chemical solutions on the recovery factor have been checked. Besides, experimental results improved the surfactant behavior of the CTA solution in water. Experiments showed that oil recovery factor increased by 5% OOIP when SDS solution was used in tertiary state. Experiments were performed in laboratory temperature and pressure around 10 bars.

Keywords :

• chemical flooding
• CTA
• EOR
• sand packed model
• SDS

NOMENCLATURE

EOR:	=	enhanced oil recovery
SOR:	=	residual oil saturation
SWC:	=	connate water saturation
OOIP:	=	original oil in place
IFT:	=	interfacial tension
PV:	=	pore volume
RF:	=	recovery factor
CTA:	=	crude terephthalic acid
HPAM:	=	hydrolyzed poly acryl amide
SDS:	=	sodium dodecyl sulfate