Evaluation of surfactant flooding using interwell tracer analysis

Abstract

Surfactant flooding is an important enhanced oil recovery (EOR) method, especially in carbonate oil reservoirs where water flooding may not have an effect on oil recovery as much as for sandstone reservoirs. This is because of the initial wettability of most carbonate reservoirs that is mixed-or oil-wet. Since surfactant flooding has a great impact on both fluid-fluid and rock-fluid interactions, it can be an efficient EOR method for these kinds of reservoirs. Surfactants affect fluid-fluid interactions by reducing interfacial tension (IFT) between water and oil phases and rock-fluid interactions by wettability alteration. The objective of this paper is the evaluation of these two surfactant mechanisms in non-fractured carbonate reservoirs using UTCHEM, the University of Texas chemical compositional simulator. In this paper, first, the laboratory data of two surfactant spontaneous imbibition tests for carbonate cores are successfully matched with modeled data to evaluate the mechanisms of surfactant flooding. Second, the field-scale surfactant flooding is simulated using the experimental data from spontaneous imbibition tests. Several cases are modeled in order to study the effect of surfactant flooding in terms of decreasing IFT and wettability alteration. Since the formation brine salinity in most reservoirs is more than the optimum salinity of surfactant phase behavior, the benefit of combining surfactant and low-salinity water is also investigated. Finally, tracer test simulation is performed to estimate the average oil saturation within the swept pore volume at the end of each recovery mode.

Application of rhamnolipid biosurfactant produced by Pseudomonas aeruginosa in microbial-enhanced oil recovery (MEOR)

“…Considering the four situations studied, the recovery factor did not exceed 42%, as shown in Table 1. This result is in agreement with typical oil fields behavior, where 60% of the original oil remains trapped after conventional recovery (Khaledialidusti et al 2017;Kumar and Mandal 2017).…”

Application of micro-substance tracer test in fractured horizontal wells

“…Tang and Harker (1991) introduced a chromatographic conversion method to study remaining oil saturation using partitioned and non-partitioned tracers in the test. Subsequent research include single well tracer test and inter-well tracer test (Bu et al 2015;Khaledialidusti et al 2017). Murayri (2019) described a single well chemical tracer test conducted in Sabriyah and Raudhatain fields and Sanni (2018) introduced a simultaneous test of a distributed tracer and a non-distributed tracer, which can provide better descriptions of the reservoir.…”

Synthesis and Characterization of Fluorescent Silica Nanoparticles With Potential Application in Transport and Adsorption Studies in Porous Medium

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