Estudo comparativo da eficiência de recuperação avançada entre sistemas microemulsionados e solução de tensoativo

Abstract

A big problem faced by oil-producing industries is the low amount of oil produced through the natural energy of the reservoir. Currently there are well defined techniques that allow an increase in oil production (conventional recovery methods), but these techniques also have limitations. Thus, it is of great importance the development of technologies to correct the problems of the conventional methods or even optimize the efficiency of advanced techniques. In this scenario, this paper conducted a comparison of the recovery efficiency between different chemical methods of enhanced oil recovery - surfactant solution injection and microemulsion system injection - in saline environment (KCl 2%) in order to indicate which of these methods has a higher efficiency potential for use in this application. The reagents used in this study were: commercial non-ionic surfactant, butanol as co-surfactant, 2% KCl solution as the aqueous phase and kerosene as organic phase. Then, the systems were chosen taking into consideration their compositions aiming at the use of small quantities of surfactant and organic phase, and the parameters used to characterize the systems were: critical micelle concentration (c.m.c), viscosity, surface tension, interfacial tension, density and particle diameter. Finally, the oil recovery experiments showed that the microemulsion system presented a better performance in comparison to surfactant solutions, reaching a total displacement efficiency of 85%, while the surfactant solution (12.5% w/w) reached 72%, and the surfactant solution at the c.m.c reached 64%