Effects of Core Size and Surfactant Choice on Fluid Saturation Development in Surfactant/Polymer Corefloods

Surfactant/polymer flooding allows for a significant increase in oil recovered at both laboratory and field scales. Limitations in application at the reservoir scale are, however, present and can be associated with both the complexity of the underlying displacement process and the time-intensive nature of the up-scaling workflow. Pivotal to this workflow are corefloods which serve to both validate the extent of oil recovery and extract modeling parameters used in upscaling. To enhance the understanding of the evolution of the saturation distribution within the rock sample, we present the utilization of X-ray computed tomography to image six distinct surfactant/polymer corefloods. In doing so, we visualize the formation and propagation of an oil bank by reconstructing multidimensional saturation maps. We conduct experiments on three distinct core sizes and two different surfactants, an SBDS/isbutanol formulation and an L-145-10s 90 formulation, in order to decouple the effect of these two parameters on the flow behavior observed in situ. We note that the oil production post oil bank breakthrough is primarily influenced by the surfactant choice, with the SDBS/isobutanol formulation displaying longer tailing production of a low oil cut. On the other hand, the core size dominated the extent of self-similarity of the saturation profiles with smaller cores showing less overlap in the self-similarity profiles. Consequently, we highlight the difference in applicability of a fractional flow approach to larger and smaller cores for upscaling parameter extraction and thus provide guidance for corefloods where direct imaging is not available.