Most common surfactants employed in chemical enhanced oil recovery

Abstract

Chemical enhanced oil recovery (EOR) and particularly surfactant injection has recently received a great deal of attention. The suggested recovery mechanisms after injecting surfactants include wettability alteration and IFT reduction. If a surfactant is properly selected according to the environmental variables-such as pressure, temperature, salinity, it can lead to more efficient enhanced recovery from an oil reservoir. On the other hand, poor selection of the surfactant can result in a low recovery and can even become detrimental to the reservoir due to undesirable wettability alteration and possible rock dissolution resulting in a chemical reaction with displacing fluid and blockage of the pore space. Also, choosing the wrong surfactant without considering the rock mineralogy may result in high adsorption on the pore surface of the rock and unnecessary waste of resources. It is also worthy to note that surfactants are some of the most expensive chemicals used during EOR. Extensive literature review suggests that anionic surfactant are the preferred surfactant category for EOR especially when it comes to sandstone reservoirs. Occasionally, in specific situations a better performance have been reported after injecting cationic, non-ionic or mixtures of both surfactants, particularly when dealing with carbonate reservoirs. This paper presents in detail a review of the most commonly applied surfactants in EOR studies and the optimum application criteria for of each type. To the best of the authors' knowledge, such detailed and comprehensive review is not available in the literature, presently.