Surfactant-induced wettability alteration in reservoirs for Enhanced Oil Recovery
The wettability properties of a reservoir play a key role in determining the efficiency of various oil recovery processes. Surfactants, with their dual (hydrophilic and hydrophobic) nature, can adsorb onto reservoirs and change their wettability along with reducing the interfacial tension of water and oil. Surfactant induced wettability processes depend on a number of parameters like rock mineralogy, permeability, porosity, capillary number, temperature and pressure conditions, brine composition, surfactant type, surfactant adsorption property etc. A reservoir can exhibit different wettability scenarios like homogeneous and heterogeneous wettability, mixed and fractional wettability, and as such accurate description and characterization of reservoir wettability is required for implementing wettability alteration based EOR techniques. My research is directed towards performing experiments to study wettability alteration using surfactants and how the ultimate oil recovery is influenced after treatment with surfactants. The experimental results will then be used to devise a general model for designing of surfactants required, as a function of the reservoir parameters.