Injection of amphoteric surfactants and ionic liquid base surfactants to enhance oil recovery

Due to increasing oil price in recent decades and The growing need for it, it is important to find high performance and cost effective enhance oil recovery methods. More than half of the world s oil reservoirs and Especially Iran’s reservoirs are carbonate. These reservoirs rock are often oil-wet or mix-wet. Therefore because of failure to occur of spontaneous imbibition, secondary recovery efficiency by water flooding is about 10-30%. in recent decades, many researches have done on chemical enhance oil recovery methods in the field of laboratory and field scale. Surfactant is the most useful chemical of chemical enhance oil recovery method.In this research, we investigated the efficiency of amphoteric commercial surfactants and ionic liquid based surfactants as the substitute of conventional unstable surfactants. For this purpose, the interfacial tension and contact angle of the three commercial amphoteric surfactants NX-1510, NX-2760, TR-880 and ionic liquid based Surfactant [C12 mim] [Cl] were investigated. The results showed that the TR-880 Surfactant, which has the longest hydrocarbon chain among the used surfactants, has the highest efficiency in reducing interfacial tension and also improving wettability by cleaning mechanism. Also, the effect of water formulation has investigated on The efficiency of injected surfactants and for this purpose, two water sources of formation water and Persian Gulf water has investigated. The used Surfactants are designed for high salinity condition. The results also showed that, in the condition of using chemical compounds,formation water efficiency is higher in reducing interfacial tension and improving wettability of injected surfactants and also natural surfactants, including resin and asphaltene. However, before using chemical compounds, Sea water acts like smart water and improves the wettability

Keywords:

interfacial tension reduction , wettability modification , ionic liquid , amphoteric surfactant