Surfactant formulation development for shallow reservoirs with high clay content

Abstract

Sandstone reservoirs with high clay content can potentially adsorb large amounts of surfactants making the chemical flood processes unattractive. The objective of this work was to develop an alkaline-surfactant-polymer (ASP) process for a shallow, clayey sandstone reservoir to minimize surfactant retention. The phase behavior study was conducted to identify commercially available surfactants that display ultralow interfacial tension behavior. The selected surfactant formulations were tested in tertiary ASP core floods in outcrop and reservoir rocks. Many surfactant formulations were identified which gave ultralow IFT, but the formulation with only one surfactant (at 0.5 wt% concentration) in presence of one co-solvent was selected for core floods. The cumulative oil recovery was in the range of 92–96% of the original oil in place (OOIP) in the core floods. The surfactant retention was low (0.15 mg/gm of rock) in spite of the high clay content due to the use of alkali. The study showed that 0.5 PV of ASP slug and 2700 ppm of the polymer were required to make the flood effective. Injection of the ASP slug immediately after the field brine flood with divalent ions did not cause any plugging or adverse effect. The novelty of this work lies in designing ASP formulations with a single surfactant and reducing the residual oil saturations to ∼3% in field cores along with low surfactant retention. This paper illustrates a workflow to identify the chemical formulation, chemical concentrations and slug sizes.