Abstract
The surfactant injection is considered as the EOR (Enhanced Oil Recovery) with the highest potential to recover oil from reservoirs due to its ability to reduce interfacial forces into the porous medium. However, the adsorption of this type of chemical on the surface of rocks is the main problem when a surfactant injection project is applied since the surfactant molecules would rather be placed on rock minerals instead of being the oil–water interface. Based on this fact, this chapter would be discussed the significance of surfactant injection as an EOR method, the types of surfactants used, the main mechanism and parameters involved in the surfactant adsorption on the rock, and its consequences in oil recovery. Likewise, the addition of nanoparticles to inhibit the adsorption of surfactants is another topic that will be covered as a novel technology to improve the efficiency of the EOR process.
Highlights
In the hydrocarbon industry, there is a constant need to obtain large volumes of oil, which leads to the development of new techniques to extract the greater amount of oil into the reservoirs, which, using conventional technologies, would be impossible to achieve
Mineralogy: It is of great importance to identify the minerals that make up the solid substrate or porous medium, which will be contacted by the injected surfactants since depending on which components form the surface of the rock, certain adsorption mechanisms exist and will give a guideline for select the type of surfactants that should be implemented in an enhanced recovery processes to reduce the chemical adsorption on the rock
Due to the inconveniences experienced by the injection of surfactants, in which there are a low reduction in interfacial tension, high technical costs and large amounts of surfactant adsorbed on the rock; new technologies have been proposed to optimize surfactant injection processes, where the application of nanoparticles is seen as a proposal to improve the technique performance
Summary
There is a constant need to obtain large volumes of oil, which leads to the development of new techniques to extract the greater amount of oil into the reservoirs, which, using conventional technologies, would be impossible to achieve. The application of Enhanced Oil Recovery or EOR methods has been an opportunity to accomplish a substantial increase in hydrocarbon production in depleted reservoirs. The surfactant injection is a recovery technique with great potential for recovery [1], which has shown an important effect in increasing the capillary number “Nc” (dimensionless variable, which relates viscous with interfacial forces). Among the most notable problems in the application of this method, it is the adsorption of surfactant on the rock, which leads to the chemical being trapped on the surface of the mineral substrate instead being positioned at the water–oil interface to reduce the interfacial tension
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