Comparative study of natural chemical for enhanced oil recovery: Focus on extraction and adsorption at quartz sand surface

Abstract

In chemical enhanced oil recovery (CEOR), it is very important to utilize the excessive usage of chemicals. A great opportunity lies in adopting natural surfactants, since it is cheaper, ecosystem friendly, and less toxic than their counterpart synthetic surfactants. Despite the availability of natural surfactant sources, it is yet very early to decide on their applicability. Therefore, this research focuses on natural-saponin extracted from different raw materials available in the Middle East and their interaction with quartz-sand. A special focus was given to the adsorption isotherm models to describe the interaction with the reservoir rocks.

Three raw materials were investigated are fenugreek, sugar beet leaves and chickpeas. The main extraction method employed was the chemical extraction using the soxhelet. The study used Uv-vis spectrometer to investigate the micellization behaviour and the consequent adsorption on quartz-sand. The presence of triterpenoid saponin is found dominant in all the sample, the intensity and purity differed according to the raw material source. Tthe critical micelle concentration (CMC) was at a close range of 4-5.5 wt% in all the samples. The highest adsorption was obtained by sugar beet leaves which is 192 g/kg. It is 25% and 37% higher than the Fenugreek and chickpeas, respectively. Increasing the salinity resulted in adsorption reduction between 2% and 56%. For the adsorption isotherms, it showed good agreement with the Langmuir model fitting. The remarkable finding is that the sugar beet leaves heterogeneous model seems to be valid by Frendluich and Halsey isotherms.

Keywords

Natural surfactants / Quartz / Adsorption isotherm / Salinity / Fenugreek / Sugar beet leaves / Chickpeas

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