Date of Award

5-2017

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Petroleum Engineering (MSPE)

Department

Chemical and Petroleum Engineering

First Advisor

Gamal Alusta

Second Advisor

Abdulrazag Zekri

Third Advisor

Eric J. Mackay

Abstract

Various enhanced oil recovery methods including miscible gas injection, chemical, thermal and other methods are applied at the third phase of production after the primary and secondary recovery have been exhausted. Surfactant flooding is one of the chemical methods that is capable of recovering more oil by decreasing the IFT and/or wettability alteration.This piece of work aims to asses and select the development options using surfactant process that maximize oil recovery for a synthetic reservoir model by optimizing technical and economic analysis.

Reservoir simulation study using ECLIPSE 100 was used to study the different development options of surfactant flooding applied and compare them to water flooding. The development options include continuous surfactant injection, secondary surfactant flooding, and tertiary surfactant flooding.Through the study, the effect of injection rate, surfactant concentration and slug size were investigated by setting up a range of sensitivities.

Results of the study reveal a general trend of increased oil recovery with the implementation of surfactant flooding over water flooding in the range of 0.3 - 7%. In the continuous surfactant injection, the highest field oil efficiency of about 52% was achieved using surfactant concentration of 30 lb/stb at 2000 stb/d. The optimum development process from the technical and economic point of view is injecting 0.25 PV of surfactant as a tertiary recovery process using 25 lb/stb of surfactant and 2000 stb/d as an injection rate. The selected system yields an oil recovery of 48.91%. The outcomes of this project is expected to assist the oil industry in planning surfactant flooding for heterogeneous reservoirs; which is the case of most reservoirs in UAE.

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