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- Title
Evaluation of surfactant flooding using interwell tracer analysis.
- Authors
Khaledialidusti, Rasoul; Kleppe, Jon; Enayatpour, Saeid
- 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.
- Subjects
MICELLAR flooding (Petroleum engineering); PETROLEUM prospecting; OIL fields; POLYMER flooding (Petroleum engineering); ENHANCED oil recovery; PRODUCTION methods in oil fields
- Publication
Journal of Petroleum Exploration & Production Technology, 2017, Vol 7, Issue 3, p853
- ISSN
2190-0558
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1007/s13202-016-0288-9