Technical Evaluation of a Surfactant Injection Process for Heavy Oil Recovery by Laboratory-Scale Numerical Simulation

Surfactant flooding comes up as a potential enhanced oil recovery method for heavy oil exploitation as a solution to energy losses in thermal processes. This research aims to use an inverse problem to determine the most suitable application scenario of this process at the laboratory scale by the use of reservoir simulation. First of all, a numerical laboratory model was built, representing an alkali-surfactant flooding test of crude oil with a viscosity of 1800 MPa*s; secondly, an optimization process was carried out, where operational parameters, such as, alkali and surfactant concentration, size of the main chemical slug and injection rate, were evaluated. Results showed that the most suitable scenario consisted on the injection of 0.5 PV from the combined mixture 0.2% Na2CO3 + 0.2% NaOH + 100 ppm Surfactant at an injection rate of 0.1 cm3/min, getting a final chemical-oil relation about 0.0010 cm3 of chemical per cm3 of oil.