Events :: Graduate Seminars :: An Overview of Recent Advances in Chemical Methods of Enhanced Oil Recovery by Dr. Gary Pope, Director of the Center for Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin

Many new field projects using chemicals for enhanced oil recovery have started recently or are in the planning stages due to the recent increases in crude oil prices. The process known as alkaline-surfactant-polymer (ASP) flooding is especially attractive to industry because ASP requires significantly less surfactant than traditional surfactant-polymer (SP) flooding and has the potential to recovery much more oil than polymer flooding (PF). This presentation will be an overview of recent advances in chemical methods. Some of the most significant changes include the following:

• Surfactants and polymers with much higher performance are now available
• Reservoir modeling is vastly better and faster
• Reservoir characterization and other enabling technologies have improved
• Most polymer solutions are now injected above the parting pressure to increase the injection rate and thus improve the economics by shortening the project life
• ASP flooding is being used to recover viscous oils as well as light oils
• Inexpensive anionic surfactants are effective in carbonate formations as well as sandstones
• The time and effort required to select high performance chemicals is much shorter as well as more effective
• Numerous commercial chemical floods have been done in recent years so we have a lot more field experience to guide us in terms of what works best