The utilization of Surfactant on enhanced oil recovery chemical injection to maintain energy in Indonesia

Abstract

The needs of oil in the world for the transportation, industry, power plant and other fields drive us to be more consumptive in the utilization. Oil needs in Indonesia that keeps on increasing along the years is unequal with the number of oil exploration activity, which further create a scarcity on fossil energy fuel source availability. If Indonesia is unable to discover new oil sources as soon as possible, Indonesia is predicted to become oil importer in 2025. Oil production is known to be practiced through three steps which are primary recovery, secondary recovery, and tertiary recovery. At this moment, several oil wells in Indonesia have reached final stages of secondary recovery. If the production activity on these wells is continued, the recovered oil will never be able to reach optimum result and will unable to cover the production cost. Because of that, oil development and production management projects will never be able to run. The offered solution to fulfill this energy needs is by conducting tertiary recovery method known as Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR). EOR method is known to be able to optimize oil recovery as much as 30% of total remaining reserve on an oil or gas field. One of EOR method that will be the focus in this research is chemical injection or chemical flooding, where a certain chemical compound is injected into the reservoir with an objective of reservoir physical or chemical manipulation to facilitate oil production to the surface. The material required for chemical flooding are surfactant, alkali, and polymer. On the previously conducted research at EOR Laboratory Universitas Trisakti is aimed to observe the impact of surfactant concentration on water formation salinity on phase and interfacial tension (IFT) tests to improve surfactant performance on EOR process to optimize recovery factor (RF) or oil production. Chemical ingredients used in this research are anionic surfactants which are Alpha Olein Sulfonate (AOS) and paraffin oil. The utilization of surfactant solution concentration is 0.5%, 1%, 1.5% and 2%. Meanwhile formation salinities are at 10,000 ppm, 15,000 ppm, and 20,000 ppm. The emulsion formed from the phase test is an upper phase. The factor of emulsion phase formation is high interfacial tension and the utilized surfactant basic ingredient is a petroleum based ingredient. The result of IFT measurement on surfactant solution possess a value range of 16 dyne/m to 41 dyne/m. Based on the research result and conducted analysis, the utilized AOS surfactant in this research is proven to be able to lower significant IFT of water and oil on emulsion percentage formed and stable at 18.75% on 1.5% concentration with water salinity of 15,000 ppm.