A viscoelastic self-regulating agent for enhance oil recovery

Abstract

A novel hydrophobic monomer, allyl dodecylphenol polyoxyethylene ether (DP), was synthesized by reacting dodecylphenol polyoxyethylene ether (DPEO) and allyl chloride. Then DP was reacted with acrylamide (AM) and acrylic acid (AA) to form the viscoelastic self-regulating agent (DPPAM). The structure, thermalstability and microstructure of DPPAM was characterized by FT-IR, 1H-NMR, elemental analysis, thermal gravimetric analysis (TGA) and scanning electron microscope (SEM). Moreover, effect of DP dosage, DPPAM and salt concentrations as well as of the temperature and shear rate on the solution viscosity was investigated. Results indicated that 0.4 mol% DP can significantly improve the viscosity of the DPPAM solution to 100.01 mPa·s, and the CAC of DPPAM was 2.3 g/L. Notably, DPPAM showed superior properties in regard to temperature-tolerance, shear-tolerance and salt-tolerance than PPAM. Core flooding test declared that DPPAM enhanced oil recovery by 17.56 %, which was much better than 5.66 % of PPAM. All these features indicated that DPPAM has a better application potential in EOR than PPAM.