Toward Reservoir-on-a-Chip: Rapid Performance Evaluation of Enhanced Oil Recovery Surfactants for Carbonate...

Enhanced oil recovery (EOR) plays a significant role in improving oil production. Tertiary EOR, including surfactant flooding, can potentially mobilize residual oil after water flooding. Prior to the field deployment, the surfactant performance must be evaluated using site-specific crude oil at reservoir conditions. Core flood experiments are common practice to evaluate surfactants for oil displacement efficiency using core samples. Core flood experiments, however, are expensive and time-consuming and do not allow for pore scale observations of fluid-fluid interactions. This work introduces the framework to evaluate the performance of EOR surfactants via a Reservoir-on-a-Chip approach, which uses microfluidic devices to mimic the oil reservoir. A unique feature of this study is the use of chemically modified micromodels such that the pore surfaces are representative of carbonate reservoir rock. To represent calcium carbonate reservoir pores, the inner channels of glass microfluidic devices were coated with thin layers of calcium carbonate nanocrystals and the surface was modified to exhibit oil-wet conditions through a crude oil aging process. During surfactant screening, oil and water phases were imaged by fluorescence microscopy to reveal the micro to macro scale mechanisms controlling surfactant-assisted oil recovery. The role of the interfacial tension (IFT) and wettability in the microfluidic device was simulated using a phase-field model and compared to laboratory results. We demonstrated the effect of low IFT at the oil-water interface and wettability alteration on surfactant-enhanced oil displacement efficiency; thus providing a time-efficient and low-cost strategy for quantitative and qualitative assessment. In addition, this framework is an effective method for pre-screening EOR surfactants for use in carbonate reservoirs prior to further core and field scale testing.