"Improving the Recovery of Residual Oil by Surfactant/Protein Flooding"

Abstract

The depletion of crude oil in the world is a great problem facing the technological and industrial sectors all over the world. The gap between the required and present amounts of energy source can be compensated by several routes including: renewable energy, biofuel and recover of the crude oil from depleted oilfields. Several methods were used to recover the crude oils including the use of recovering solutions which form emulsions by the crude oil and can be easily extracted. In this study, environmentally friendly nonionic surfactants were applied as additives for formulation of recovery fluids in enhanced oil recovery process. The influence of the process parameters were studied including: surfactant concentration, pH of the medium, salinity and the chemical structure of the used surfactants. The obtained recovery efficiencies of the different surfactants were ranged between 27-65% in the presence of the most effective derivative of Sorbitan