Enhanced Oil Recovery

Alkaline Surfactant Polymer (ASP) process is a tertiary method of oil recovery that has promising results for future development. It has already been implemented in different areas of the United States such as Wyoming, west Texas, also in Canada and China. The success of this process depends on the proper combination of alkali, surfactant, and polymer and their compatibility with a reservoir. Therefore, the main objective of the proposed research is to identify chemical interactions between ASP chemicals and reservoir fluids and rock. I hypothesize that testing different alkalis, polymers and surfactants will result not only in getting different profiles of rheological properties of ASP system, but also analyzing compatibility degrees of chemicals with formation fluids and rock properties such as rock wettability, oil mobility and sweep efficiency which will be affected by the designed ASP system. In this paper the results of chemical interactions between ASP chemicals and reservoir fluids are presented and the phenomena occurred are described.