Preparation and Characterization of Modified Biopolymers for Improving Crude Oil Production under Egyptian Reservoirs Conditions

Abstract

The world continues to rely heavily on oil for primary energy where, the uses for petroleum have expanded to almost every area of life. To meet the rising energy consumption in the world and depletion of conventional hydrocarbon resources, there is a dire need to produce more crude oil so, the oil and gas industry needs new developed techniques called enhanced oil recovery (EOR) for increasing recovery rate and productive index. Enhanced Oil Recovery occurs after all possible oil is pumped out of the ground using traditional methods (Primary and secondary). Polymer flooding is one of the most widely used EOR methods to retrieve oil left behind after conventional recovery processes where polymers have benefits in enhancing the viscosity of water solution, which in turn reducing the mobility ratio between water and oil, resulting in improvement of sweep efficiency. It has been used for more than 40 years to effectively recover the remaining oil from the reservoir. Polymers from natural sources have been selected because the raw materials are in abundance, readily available, easy to handle, environmentally friendly, and biodegradable. Their rigid structure and long polysaccharides chains make them suitable to withstand the harsh reservoir conditions. In the last few years, increasing interest has been shown in the synthesis of chemically modified polysaccharides through grafting with synthetic vinyl monomers that combine the advantages of both synthetic and natural polymers. In this study, two biopolymers (xanthan gum and guar gum), have been modified by introducing vinyl monomers and vinyl silane monomer to xanthan gum, guar gum and a mixture of two biopolymers together by free radical emulsion polymerization reaction using potassium persulfate as an initiator and sodium dodecyl sulfate as emulsifier.