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A New Approach to Determine the Individual Chemical Concentrations in Surfactant-polymer Mixtures
- Publisher: European Association of Geoscientists & Engineers
- Source: Conference Proceedings, 79th EAGE Conference and Exhibition 2017, Jun 2017, Volume 2017, p.1 - 5
Abstract
Summary
Surfactant-polymer (S-P) flooding is one of the most important chemical enhanced oil recovery (EOR) technologies used in the fields. Once the S-P solution is injected in the subterranean formation, the polymer suffers from mechanical and chemical degradation, and the surfactant adsorbs onto rock or partitions between water and oil phase. This makes for significant changes of the chemical compositions in the chemical slug compared to the compositions originally injected in the reservoir, as well as produced waters. In this work, we developed a new approach to combine gel permeation chromatography (GPC) analysis and total organic carbon (TOC) analysis to monitor the variation of chemical concentrations and molecular weights of polymers in the SP flooding process. The concentration and molecular weight of polymers were determined by GPC and surfactant concentrations were determined by calculating total organic carbon contribution measured by TOC analyzer. In a real surfactant-polymer flooding case, the results showed the degradation and loss of polymer and surfactant in the flooding process. This helps to better understand the performance of the SP flooding process.
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