A Surfactant for Enhanced Heavy Oil Recovery in Carbonate Reservoirs in High-Salinity and High-Temperature Conditions

• Main Authors: Yu-Qi Yang, Liang Li, Xiang Wang, Yue-Qun Fu, Xiao-Qing He, Shi-Ling Zhang, Ji-Xiang Guo
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2020-09-01
• Series: Energies
• Subjects: surfactant; heat resistance; salinity tolerance; enhanced heavy oil recovery; carbonate reservoirs
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/13/17/4525

In view of the difficulty of producing heavy oil from carbonate reservoirs, the surfactant SDY-1 was synthesized by homogeneous solution polymerization with a homogeneous solution polymerization technique using aliphatic amine polyoxyethylene ether (PAE_n) H(OCH₂CH₂)_nNR(CH₂CH₂O)_nH as the raw material, epichlorohydrin as the reaction intermediate, tetrabutylammonium bromide and pentamethyldivinyltriamine as the promoters, and alkylphenol as the catalyst. Based on the analysis of reservoir fluid and rock properties, the performance of the surfactant SDY-1 was evaluated in terms of its heat resistance, its salinity tolerance, its ability to change the heavy oil–water interfacial tension and rock wettability and its oil washing efficiency. The results show that when the salinity of the formation water is 2.23 × 10⁵ mg/L, the addition of surfactant SDY-1 can lower the super-heavy oil–water interfacial tension with an asphaltene concentration of 30.19 wt.%, which is aged at a temperature of 140 °C for 3 days, from 22.41 to 0.366 mN/m. In addition, the surfactant SDY-1 can change the contact angle of super-heavy oil–water–rock from 129.7 to 67.4° and reduce the adhesion of crude oil to the rock surface by 99.26%. The oil displacement experiment indicates that the oil washing efficiency of the surfactant SDY-1 can reach 78.7% after ageing at a temperature of 140 °C for 3 days. Compared with petroleum sulfonate flooding, the addition of SDY-1 can improve the displacement efficiency by 33.6%, and the adsorption loss is only 0.651 mg/g oil sand. It has broad application prospects for heavy oil reservoirs with high temperatures, high pressures and high asphaltene contents.