Experimental Study Of Apg (Alkyl Polyglicoside) Surfactant For Enhanced Waterflooding

Abstract

Since 1997, Indonesian oil production from year to year has been decreasing continuously. Meanwhile, the demand of national oil is increasing annually more than domestic production. Consequently, Indonesian government has already spent much money to solve is problem. Oil field condition is the main factor of decreasing oil production in Indonesia . Almost of the all oil fields in Indonesia are brown fields that only have been produced in the primary stage. Therefore, we have to do EOR methods to increase oil field production in Indonesia. One of EOR methods is chemical flooding using surfactant. Commonly, we used petroleum surfactant for chemical flooding. However, the petroleum surfactant has some disadvantages than plant-based surfactants. Petroleum surfactant does not resist to high salinity and high hardness. This study, we use alkyl polyglycoside surfactant that is extracted from fatty alcohol and starches to substitute the petroleum based surfactant. In investigating APG surfactant performance and knowing the best formula APG surfactant for enhanced water flooding, synthetic core, and crude oil are used for flooding tests. The result shows that the APG surfactant formula have very good performance on the compatibility, the thermal stability and phase behaviour tests. However it is still not good result on filtration. The best surfactant formula a found to be 0.2 PV of surfactant solution injected.