Screening of selected surfactants to alter wettability for EOR applications

Enhanced oil recovery is a very important activity in the production of oil from reservoirs which have reached residual oil and are in need of secondary recovery methods to extract the hydrocarbons. These reservoirs to be produced require water flooding or gas injection to assist in its production. This project looks at reservoirs that are oil wet and there for when water is injected into the reservoir, which can be recovered by the use of solvent or surfactants also known as surface active agents to alter the wettability of the rocks and allow for the process of imbibition to occur and for the oil in the reservoir to be produced. There is a lot of research in the industry about the selection and optimization of surfactants but there is still a gap to cover more areas about this topic. Therefore, it is important to do more research to add to what is known about the use of surfactants in EOR applications. This project studies suitable surfactants to alter wettability, and optimize them to get the optimum alteration of wettability. The optimized surfactant showed high activity towards the alteration of wettability. The project also finds the recovery attainable by the selected surfactant.