Single micellar slugs, tertiary recovery

Table III. Tertiary Recovery with Single Micellar Slugs...

Micellar flooding is a promising tertiary oil-recovery method, perhaps the only method that has been shown to be successful in the field for depleted light oil reservoirs. As a tertiary recovery method, the micellar flooding process has desirable features of several chemical methods (e.g., miscible-type displacement) and is less susceptible to some of the drawbacks of chemical methods, such as adsorption. It has been shown that a suitable preflush can considerably curtail the surfactant loss to the rock matrix. In addition, the use of multiple micellar solutions, selected on the basis of phase behavior, can increase oil recovery with respect to the amount of surfactant, in comparison with a single solution. Laboratory tests showed that oil recovery-to-slug volume ratios as high as 15 can be achieved [439]. 

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