Abstract
Surfactant flooding is an important technique used to improve oil recovery from mature oil reservoirs due to minimizing the interfacial tension (IFT) between oil and water and/or altering the rock wettability toward water-wet using various surfactant agents including cationic, anionic, non-ionic, and amphoteric varieties. In this study, two amino-acid based surfactants, named lauroyl arginine (l-Arg) and lauroyl cysteine (l-Cys), were synthesized and used to reduce the IFT of oil–water systems and alter the wettability of carbonate rocks, thus improving oil recovery from oil-wet carbonate reservoirs. The synthesized surfactants were characterized using Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy and nuclear magnetic resonance analyses, and the critical micelle concentration (CMC) of surfactant solutions was determined using conductivity, pH, and turbidity techniques. Experimental results showed that the CMCs of l-Arg and l-Cys solutions were 2000 and 4500 ppm, respectively. It was found that using l-Arg and l-Cys solutions at their CMCs, the IFT and contact angle were reduced from 34.5 to 18.0 and 15.4 mN/m, and from 144° to 78° and 75°, respectively. Thus, the l-Arg and l-Cys solutions enabled approximately 11.9% and 8.9% additional recovery of OOIP (original oil in place). It was identified that both amino-acid surfactants can be used to improve oil recovery due to their desirable effects on the EOR mechanisms at their CMC ranges.
Highlights
Consumption of oil, the most common energy source, has been increased in the world and discovery of new oil reservoirs has been reduced due to exploration difficulties (Ali et al 2018a)
The ultimate goal of this study is to investigate the effects of two synthetic eco-friendly surfactants called lauroyl arginine (l-Arg) and lauroyl cysteine (l-Cys) on improving oil recovery from carbonate reservoirs
Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR) and 1 H-nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy were used to confirm the structure of the synthesized amino-acidbased-surfactant, as shown in Figs. 6 and 7
Summary
Consumption of oil, the most common energy source, has been increased in the world and discovery of new oil reservoirs has been reduced due to exploration difficulties (Ali et al 2018a). The oil industry focuses more on increasing the production from the currently producing reservoirs using different oil recovery methods including primary, secondary, and tertiary recovery processes (Ali et al 2018b). Oil is usually recovered using the internal energy of the reservoir, while, water and gas injections are secondary methods used to maintain the reservoir pressure and increase the recovery factor after the decline of the reservoir. The primary and secondary recovery techniques enable the production of only about one-third of the oil from the reservoir (Kamal et al 2017; Emadi et al 2018; Ali et al 2019a). EOR processes, such as thermal recovery, chemical recovery, miscible and immiscible flooding play a great role in extracting some of the remaining crude oil and improving oil recovery.
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