Dr. Elsharafi, McCoy School of Engineering
The purpose of this project is to understand the effectiveness of a surfactant/alkaline on enhanced oil recovery (EOR) on a mature reservoir. The aim is to find out how different concentrations of surfactants/alkalines change the wettability of mature reservoirs. Wettability is the tendency of a fluid to adhere to a surface. There are two main types of wettability: oil-wet where oil adheres to the rock and water-wet where water adheres to the rock. Surfactant/alkaline flooding is the injection of a surfactant/alkaline that changes the wetting phase of a formation. The approach for this project is to saturate a core sample 100% with oil and then put it into an Amott Cell with a surfactant/alkaline solution. The expected outcome is that as surfactant/alkaline concentration increases oil recovery also increases logarithmically.