Otherwise known as improved oil recovery or tertiary recovery, EOR
is crucial for recovering the maximum oil that is available and its
importance is increasing as the easy-to-access reservoirs of oil and
gas become depleted.
The success of EOR maximises the amount of oil that is recovered
from a reservoir, extending this finite resource. There are a number
of methods used to recover the oil including chemical injection, gas
injection, microbial injection, and thermal recovery by steam
injection (cyclic and flooding).
When looking to increase the produced oil from an oilfield, our
surfactants for enhanced oil recovery offer solutions to maximise
oil recovery. Our largest range of chemistries for EOR includes
emulsifiers and inverters which are used to produce polymers for
EOR applications. The polymerisation process involves the
solubilisation of monomers in the water phase followed by
emulsification in a continuous oil phase using primary and
secondary emulsifiers. The polymerisation reaction is initiated, and
when the reaction reaches completion inverters are added to help
to release the polymer into water.
Processes and formulations for the inverse emulsion polymerisation
of water soluble polymers vary considerably dependent on many
factors. For more information on our product offering for enhanced
oil recovery please visit out Water Treatment website.
Specifically within alkaline surfactant polymer (ASP) flooding, we
provide demulsifiers and deoiling technologies to help recover oil
from challenging conditions. In addition, due to the difficult nature of
this application we have proven case studies of working with ourcustomers on specific oil samples to provide working solutions on a
case by case basis.