Nonionic Surfactant to Enhance the Performances of Alkaline–Surfactant–Polymer Flooding with a Low Salinity Constraint

Abstract

This paper presents a nonionic surfactant in the anionic surfactant pair (ternary mixture) that influences the hydrophobicity of the alkaline–surfactant–polymer (ASP) slug within low-salinity formation water, an environment that constrains optimal designs of the salinity gradient and phase types. The hydrophobicity effectively reduced the optimum salinity, but achieving as much by mixing various surfactants has been challenging. We conducted a phase behavior test and a coreflooding test, and the results prove the effectiveness of the nonionic surfactant in enlarging the chemical applicability by making ASP flooding more hydrophobic. The proposed ASP mixture consisted of 0.2 wt% sodium carbonate, 0.25 wt% anionic surfactant pair, and 0.2 wt% nonionic surfactant, and 0.15 wt% hydrolyzed polyacrylamide. The nonionic surfactant decreased the optimum salinity to 1.1 wt% NaCl compared to the 1.7 wt% NaCl of the reference case with heavy alcohol present instead of the nonionic surfactant. The coreflooding test confirmed the field applicability of the nonionic surfactant by recovering more oil, with the proposed scheme producing up to 74% of residual oil after extensive waterflooding compared to 51% of cumulative oil recovery with the reference case. The nonionic surfactant led to a Winsor type III microemulsion with a 0.85 pore volume while the reference case had a 0.50 pore volume. The nonionic surfactant made ASP flooding more hydrophobic, maintained a separate phase of the surfactant between the oil and aqueous phases to achieve ultra-low interfacial tension, and recovered the oil effectively.