Currently the waste generated from public consumption in Indonesia is very high. One such waste is used palm oil from households and food companies. Utilization of this waste in this research is by recycling waste oil into surfactants which will be used in the Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) process. The surfactant concentrations used were 1.3%, 1.5%, 2%, 2.2% and 2.5%. The research began with refining used cooking oil with banana peels for 24 hours. In order to make surfactants, the oil is mixed with KOH and distilled water. Additionaly, brine was made with a salinity of 15,000 ppm. With the interfacial tension test, a solution with an optimum surfactant concentration of 2.2% was obtained. The core flooding test was carried out using waterflooding followed by surfactant flooding at a temperature of 70 oC. From the test results obtained an incremental oil recovery factor of 8.57% and a total oil recovery factor of 47.43%.

Smart waterflooding has proven successfully improving oil recovery in numbers of laboratory and field scale applications. The phenomena behind the positive outcome is concluded to be wettability alteration. The smart water composition changes the wettability of the rock surface into partially water-wet, thus promoting a spontaneous imbibition of the aqueous phase and displacing the oil. However, there are some mechanisms causing the wettability alteration that have been proposed by researchers. The present study examines the oil recovery from spontaneous imbibition tests by modifying certain ion composition of the smart water. Prepared core samples with initial water and oil saturation were immersed in spontaneous imbibition cells filled with smart water and the oil recovered was monitored for some period of time. The predesigned smart water compositions consist of different ions concentration, i.e., Na+, Ca2+, and Mg2+, while maintaining identical total dissolved solid (TDS). The experimental results found that the ion composition of smart water affects the oil recovery regardless of the TDS, and low Ca2+ and Mg2+ concentrations shows the highest recovery factor.

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