Abstract
Abstract This review discusses surfactants used for chemical flooding, including surfactant-polymer flooding and alkali-surfactant-polymer flooding. The review, unlike most previous reviews in the field, has a surfactant focus, not a focus on the flooding process. It deals with recent results, mainly from 2010 and onward. Older literature is referred to when needed in order to put more recent findings into a perspective.
Highlights
Due to improved drilling techniques and to expectations of raising oil prices, there has been a renewed interest in enhanced oil recovery during the last decade
Many methods exist to increase the yield of oil beyond what can be achieved by just injecting water into the reservoir. They are collectively referred to as enhanced oil recovery (EOR) or tertiary oil recovery and they include chemical EOR, thermal EOR, hydrodynamic EOR and gas EOR
The main role of the surfactant used for EOR is to reduce the interfacial tension between the oil present in the reservoir and the injected water, co/w
Summary
Due to improved drilling techniques and to expectations of raising oil prices, there has been a renewed interest in enhanced oil recovery during the last decade. This review deals with one of the chemical EOR techniques: the use of surfactants to increase the recovery of oil from reservoirs. One purpose of adding alkali is that the base generates salts of naphthenic acid from the oil, which means that a surface-active species is formed in situ. Simple inorganic salts, such as sodium carbonate, sodium bicarbonate or sodium hydroxide, are commonly used as alkali source but ammonia [1] and \organic alkali", such as ethanolamine [2], ethylene diamine [3] or polyoxypropylene diamine [4] offer advantages in reservoirs that contain gypsum, CaSO4 · 2H2O. Surface active agents can be generated in situ by microorganisms injected into the reservoir This procedure is usually referred to as Microbial Enhanced Oil Recovery (MEOR). It primarily deals with papers from 2010 and onwards but older references are included to put the more recent literature into perspective
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
