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How to Attain Ultralow Interfacial Tension and Three-Phase Behavior with Surfactant Formulation for Enhanced Oil Recovery: A Review. Part 4: Robustness of the Optimum Formulation Zone Through the Insensibility to Some Variables and the Occurrence of Complex Artifacts

  • Review Article
  • Published:
Journal of Surfactants and Detergents

Abstract

In enhanced oil recovery, not only the low-tension performance, but also the robustness at optimum formulation is an important issue. The fourth part of our review series is dedicated to robustness, defined as the width of the zone exhibiting three-phase behavior around the optimum formulation, whatever the scanned variable. It is first corroborated from a screening of the available data in the literature that the tension minimum is inversely proportional to the square of the three-phase range in the HLD scale. However, since there is still an inaccuracy of about a factor 10 in the tension minimum, some significant improvement can be attained in some cases by increasing the three-phase behavior width in two ways. The first approach consists of finding systems that are insensitive to some formulation variable such as temperature, surfactant mixture composition or concentration, and water-to-oil ratio. The second way is to produce an artifact through which the optimum formulation is produced twice in a scan. If the distance between the two events in the scan is reduced down to be zero, their corresponding three-phase behavior zones merge and result in a wider WIII region with a low tension. Several cases of such events are reported: alkaline scans, anionic-nonionic and anionic-cationic mixture changes, linear change in composition in three-surfactant mixture, partial precipitation from a surfactant mixture in a salinity scan, and excessive partitioning of polyethoxylated nonionics. More complex transitions with three effects in a single scan or three concomitantly scanned variables show even more possibilities in practice.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank CEPSA for providing various linear alkyl benzene sulfonate mixture samples indicated as xϕCNLAS and SASOL for providing a specially prepared extended surfactant of the branched-dodecyl polypropoxylated (20PO) sulfate type indicated as Guerbert C12 PO20 S. The authors thanks researchers Aram Quijada and Mairis Guevara for their measurements of interfacial tension in special surfactant mixture systems.

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  1. FIRP Laboratory, Universidad de Los Andes, Mérida, Venezuela

    Jean-Louis Salager, Raquel E. Antón, María A. Arandia & Ana M. Forgiarini

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  1. Jean-Louis Salager
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  2. Raquel E. Antón
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  3. María A. Arandia
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  4. Ana M. Forgiarini
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Correspondence to Jean-Louis Salager or Ana M. Forgiarini.

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Salager, JL., Antón, R.E., Arandia, M.A. et al. How to Attain Ultralow Interfacial Tension and Three-Phase Behavior with Surfactant Formulation for Enhanced Oil Recovery: A Review. Part 4: Robustness of the Optimum Formulation Zone Through the Insensibility to Some Variables and the Occurrence of Complex Artifacts. J Surfact Deterg 20, 987–1018 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11743-017-2000-6

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