ASP / SP Flooding

Description:

Increase reserves and oil production by the use of alkalis (A), surfactants (S) and polymers (P) in ASP or SP combinations.

Application:

Surfactant based processes can recover trapped and by-passed oil using surfactants (S) to drastically reduce interfacial tension and polymers (P) to improve mobility control. The alkali can help reducing surfactant adsorption and also can generate in situ surfactants that help reducing interfacial tension. Both alkaline surfactant polymer (ASP) or surfactant polymer (SP) or eventually surfactant(s) alone processes can be envisioned depending on reservoir conditions.

Results:

The EOR Alliance has developed an integrated workflow using robotics and both proprietary and other commercially available surfactants for designing optimal solutions for a variety of reservoir conditions:

• Soft or hard brine environments (sea water, high calcium concentrations)
• Heavy oils
• High temperatures
• Low permeabilities.

Issues

• High amounts of trapped and bypassed oil.
• Need to improve mobility control and sweep efficiency.
• Tailor and optimize specific formulation for variety of reservoir conditions.
• Challenging reservoir conditions: high temperatures, hard brines, high viscous oil, low permeability reservoirs, etc.

Need

• Increase reserves and oil production by using ASP/SP flooding process.
• Design these processes under optimal economical and technical conditions according to specific reservoir properties.

Objective

• Design the optimal ASP/SP formulation and slug size to increment oil production and recovery factor.
• Assess formulation performance at lab scale and predict potential issues in the field.
• Mitigate risks of failure through extensive lab study and state-of-the-art simulations.