Application of Alkaline-Surfactant-Polymer (ASP) Flooding to Enhance Oil Recovery

Industry engagement with Samruk-Kazyna

The project will directly impact oil companies such as KMG as the objective of the project is aligned with the KMG target of increasing oil recovery. ASP flooding could be a successful project for KMG oil fields by choosing the appropriate types of chemicals, which yields desired properties of polymer/surfactant. Polymer provides a significant viscosity increase of the water phase with very low concentration. Therefore, loss of polymer due to adsorption is expected to be lower. Owning to low polymer concentration required and low values of polymer adsorption on rock surface, the project is expected to have positive economic feasibility. Also, selection of appropriate surfactant will increase the capillary number and leads to decline in residual oil in reservoirs which is a noticeable benefit for KMG Company. Consequently, the overall recovery factor of the field will increase, which is very crucial for the country. Considering these factors, an increase in overall recovery factor of a particular field will have enormous impact on revenue. Therefore, the proposed research project is highly crucial for the stability and growth of country’s economy as well as KMG’s profit due to increase of oil production.

Waterflooding for improved oil recovery (IOR) is used extensively in Kazakhstan. Due to the complexity of fields, the performance of waterflooding is not at the best condition. Hence, improvement of the recovery is critical for the country and new methods should be designed to improve the recovery by waterflooding. According to the “Kazakhstan upstream oil and gas technology and R&D roadmap”, among all challenges faced by the Kazakhstan upstream oil and gas industry, the most important with the highest impact is “optimized recovery by EOR/IOR methods”. Selecting the best and the most efficient EOR technique, or combination of IOR and EOR methods are significant challenges addressed in development documents of oil and gas industry in Kazakhstan. Therefore, an important idea behind this proposal is to select and propose novel and efficient designs of EOR technique based on laboratory analysis and reservoir models to the oil industry in Kazakhstan.

Due to the oil price, oil production at lower price and higher recovery factor is very attractive for oil industries and research centers. Hence, novel EOR methods are highly noticed in the literature. Hence, introducing new and practical methods is beneficial for the oil industry in the country. ASP is considered as an effective EOR method. At the end of the project we should be able to deliver the following:
• A screening matrix for the selection of polymers, surfactants and alkali for CEOR applications for the specific field in Kazakhstan
• Prediction of the recovery increase with the selected chemical system via simulation and experimental core flooding measurement
• Recommendations for application of ASP in the field in Kazakhstan