Improvement of the Selection Method of Surfactants and Their Mixtures for Chemical Enhanced Oil Recovery

Our research focuses on the evaluation of various surfactants by several test methods in order to develop the effective surfactants or their mixtures for Chemical Enhanced Oil Recovery (CEOR) and to characterize the most important surfactant properties.

Previously no correlation was found between the specific characteristics. Therefore, a complex evaluation (CE) method was developed to select the surfactants (Nagy et al., 2015 Nagy, R., Kothencz, R., Sallai, R., and Bartha, L. (2015). An improved method for the determination of HLB properties of nonionic surfactants, Int. J. Sci. Eng. Res., 6, 3. [Google Scholar]). A weak correlation was observed using the CE method. Thus, developments were needed to contribute significantly to the selection of nonionic surfactants and their mixtures for EOR applications. A new solubility property was incorporated to the screening method; therefore the correlation improved. A relationship was found between the additional oil yield and the solubility properties of anionic and nonionic surfactants. Therefore, the new evaluation method (CRE-complex rigorous evaluation) has a more accurate relationship with additional oil yield. This developed method can reduce the cost and time required for the applied screening method.