Investigating the Effect of Different Salinity Levels of Water in Waterflooding on Drag Reducing Agent Extracted from Natural Waste Materials

The use of drag reducing agent (DRA) as an additive in oil and gas industry has
become famous and widely used nowadays. The usage of DRA is not limited in
pipeline only, it has been also used in waterflooding or water injection system.
However, information on the usage and reliability of natural polymers as DRA in
water injection system are still limited. In this paper, polymer was extracted from
natural waste materials (coconut residue) for the purpose of producing the DRA.
Other than that, the effectiveness of the DRA was tested in different properties of
water since the parameters of water used in waterflooding may vary one from
another. In this study, the focus parameter will be the water salinity and a test was
done to determine the effectiveness of the DRA in different levels of salinity. To
accomplish these objectives, an amount of coconut residue was processed for the
extraction of carboxymethylcellulose (CMC). Then, it was used as DRA and tested
by using fluid friction apparatus in different levels of salinity with 0 ppt (tap water),
10 ppt, 20 ppt, 30 ppt, 40 ppt and 50 ppt concentration. The concentration of DRA
used is 400 ppm for each sample. From the test, it was found that the DRA extracted
from natural waste materials (coconut residue) can reduce drag. Nonetheless, as the
salinity of water increase, the percentage of drag reduction decrease. Or in other
word, drag increase percentage is increased. Therefore it is concluded that, the CMC
extracted from natural waste materials (coconut residue) can act as DRA to reduce
drag in water injection system. However, by increasing the salinity of the water used,
the capability of DRA to reduce drag will decrease. This research will make the
abundance of natural waste material to turn into a resource to be utilised as DRA and
hence can transform the waste to profit in terms of operation cost. This research also
will contribute to the study of flow assurance as well as can determine whether the
different salinity of water will affect the effectiveness of DRA.