Surfactant flooding in carbonate matrix acidizing treatment has been widely used for changing the wettability of the rock and to achieve low IFT values. Optimizing the type of surfactant and concentration for the specific oil field is very important in order to avoid formation damage and to reduce the treatment cost.
We built an experimental procedure for screening the right surfactant to alter the wettability and aid in acidizing of Pekisko formation, Canada, which is strongly oil-wet and has high viscosity oil. Five surfactants were tested out of which three are cationic, one amphoteric and the other one was a fluoro-surfactant. Measurements were made of interfacial tension with different surfactant types/concentrations in brine with the oil and xylene, critical micelle concentration of each surfactant, solubility characteristics of the surfactants, compatibility of the chemical additives, wettability of the core after treating with surfactants, and core flooding in the laboratory to simulate matrix acidizing.
From the results obtained we noted that the fluoro-surfactant can cause formation damage due to precipitation in the brine. So the compatibility of every chemical additive should be tested first. The use of xylene as a pre-flush solution lowered the CMC and hence reduced the cost of the surfactant treatment. Aromox, an amine based surfactant was best suited for matrix acidizing treatment of the Pekisko formation.
Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/149259 |
Date | 02 October 2013 |
Creators | Yadhalli Shivaprasad, Arun Kumar |
Contributors | Nasr-El-Din, Hisham A, El-Halwagi, Mahmoud, Barrufet, Maria |
Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
Detected Language | English |
Type | Thesis, text |
Format | application/pdf |
Page generated in 0.0017 seconds