Kappa-Carrageenan as an Attractive Green Substitute for Polyacrylamide in Enhanced Oil Recovery Applications

Abstract

The rapidly growing demand for petroleum resources has become a crucial global problem. Therefore, a more realistic solution is required for oil production. Enhanced oil recovery (EOR) has become an essential technique to extract original oil content and maintain oil fields. During this process, certain viscous polymers are commonly used as mobility control agents. In this work, we introduce a new class of polymer to address the limitations of commercial EOR polymers. We successfully extracted kappa-type carrageenan from Eucheuma cottonii seaweed using demineralized water and ethanol precipitation. The amount of yield, intrinsic viscosity, and viscosity-average molecular mass of the extracted carrageenan were 18.64%, 12.77 dLg -1 , and 4.716×10 5 gmol -1 , respectively. Characterizations were done by dynamic viscosity and rheological measurement, along with a thermal degradation test. The measurements indicated that kappa-carrageenan is an attractive green substitute for polyacrylamide, as it showed relatively high resistance to temperature, shear rate, and salinity compared to polyacrylamidebased commercial EOR polymers. However, a higher concentration of carrageenan is still needed to reach the same viscosity as the commercial polymers.

Optimization Concentration of Irgacure® 2959 as Photo-initiator on Chitosan-Kappa-Carrageenan Based Hydrogel for Tissue Sealant

“…One of the materials that can be used as a crosslinker in chitosan hydrogel is carrageenan with good mechanical properties, biocompatible and non-toxic (Derkach et al, 2018) and can stabilize and form viscosity that it can be used as a gelling agent by forming a helical network with double molecule resulting from the sulfate group (Wang et al, 2018). There are various carrageenan types, including iota-, kappa-, and lambda-carrageenan (Darmayanti et al, 2016). In this study, we used kappa carrageenan as the basis for the hydrogel.…”

Novel polymeric nanogel as diversion agent for enhanced oil recovery

“…In contrast to near wellbore treatment applications, polymer gels are applied in injector wells through in-depth fluid diversion (IFD) to increase reservoir scale sweep efficiency. Novel gel systems allow multichoice range solutions from weak gels to sequential injection for in situ gels, colloidal dispersion gels, preformed gels, and microgels (Darmayanti et al, 2016;Lamas de Oliveira et al, 2016;Zhang et al, 2016). The objective of an IFD process is to modify reservoir inflow profile for significant reduction of thief zones effective permeability to prevent the water uptake.…”