Surfactant CEOR Project
Four research companions connect carbonate measurements, screening models and a literature evidence synthesis. Inspect a result, then open its source record. Two calculators connect trapping numbers and desaturation curves with retention-driven screening economics.
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Carbonate reservoirs hold a major share of conventional oil and dominate the mature provinces of the Middle East. Waterflooding leaves a large fraction of that oil behind: carbonate surfaces trend mixed-to-oil-wet, so capillary forces hold residual oil in films and small pores, and heterogeneity limits how much of the reservoir the injected water contacts. Chemical EOR targets the trapped fraction by changing the fluid–rock physics. Surfactants cut oil–water interfacial tension by orders of magnitude so that trapped oil can mobilize; polymers raise the viscosity of the injected water to improve sweep; both are injected as engineered slugs driven from injector to producer.
The setting studied here allows little margin: reservoir temperatures at and above 100 °C and formation brines beyond 150,000 ppm TDS with high hardness — conditions that destabilize conventional surfactants, raise retention on positively charged calcite, and narrow the workable formulation window. The four projects below share one program question: what does it take — measured trapping thresholds, stable formulations, retention below the economic gate, and honest evidence on polymer elasticity — to make chemical flooding work in Abu Dhabi's carbonates.
Oil-bank front x/L 0.62 · breakthrough at 0.73 PV
Capillary pressure sets the grip: Pc = 2σ cos θ / r for a pore throat of radius r. In an oil-wet pore the contact angle θ, measured through the water phase, exceeds 90°; cos θ is negative, and Pc opposes water entry — the rock holds its oil. Surfactants attack both terms at once. They cut the interfacial tension σ by up to five orders of magnitude, and they alter wettability, pulling θ back through 90°. Shrinking σ collapses the magnitude of Pc; crossing θ = 90° flips its sign, so the pore switches from repelling water to drawing it in, and the film-held oil releases from the surface. The same σ appears in the capillary number Nc = uμ/(φσ): lowering IFT raises Nc by the same orders of magnitude, carrying it past the mobilization thresholds measured in this program.
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Capillary pressure and capillary number — live
Oil-wet
u = 1 ft/day (Darcy) · φ = 0.22 · r = 1 μm
Capillary pressure, Pc
Pc = 2σ cos θ / r
−39.8 kPa
Negative — capillary force holds oil
Capillary number, Nc
2.79 × 10−7
Water-wet sandstone onset 1.9 × 10−5
This program — carbonate Nt,crit range 8.47 × 10−4 – 2.23 × 10−3
Mobilization range reached
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Reports
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Coreflood program · Interactive report
Coreflood measurement of capillary desaturation and critical trapping numbers in mixed-to-oil-wet carbonate cores under high-temperature, high-salinity surfactant flooding. The report carries the complete experiment records, a live computation engine, cross-core comparison, and field-rate scaling.
capillary-desaturation.adelstudio.dev
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Screening framework · Interactive companion
A retention-controlled screening framework for surfactant EOR in HTHS carbonates: measured phase behavior, interfacial tension and wettability data, and a live retention-cost gate that prices retained surfactant against the screening budget.
retention-screening.adelstudio.dev
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Screening economics · Interactive model
A discounted-cash-flow screening model that resolves surfactant dynamic retention into project value — NPV, rate of return, unit technical cost, and breakeven retention — on a basis calibrated to twelve screened corefloods.
retention-economics.adelstudio.dev
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Evidence synthesis · Interactive companion
A criteria-screened evidence synthesis of viscoelastic-polymer coreflood evidence for residual-oil desaturation, with measured carbonate injectivity bounds and a designed two-core experiment. The companion recomputes the classifier and estimator statistics live from the 49-contrast dataset.
viscoelastic-desaturation.adelstudio.dev
Trapping Number and CDC Toolkit
The calculator computes capillary, Bond and total trapping numbers from entered rate, viscosity, interfacial tension and permeability, fits a capillary desaturation curve for the critical trapping number, and converts between petroleum unit systems.
cdc-calculator.adelstudio.dev
Chemical EOR Techno-Economics
The calculator resolves a user-defined flood design into chemical demand, unit technical cost, net present value and breakeven retention.
economics-calculator.adelstudio.dev
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