A Comparison Between Performance of Produced Biosurfactant and Conventional Chemical Surfactants in Enhanced Heavy Oil Recovery

 Nowadays, application of biosurfactants in microbial enhanced oil recovery (MEOR) have aroused much attention and several investigations have been conducted on this field. But their performance in comparison to synthetic surfactants in enhanced oil recovery has little been studied. Most of these researches are limited to comparison of one produced biosurfactant with only a chemical surfactant. To fill this gap, in this research, the potential use of a rhamnolipid type biosurfactant  in MEOR was compared to several conventional synthesized surfactants: SDS, SDBS, CTAB and DTAB. Since the main goal of this research is the comparison between produced biosurfactant and conventional chemical surfactants in oil recovery, several flooding tests were conducted and involved mechanisms were investigated. All of tests were conducted in an oil wet glass micromodel saturated with heavy oil at ambient condition. Injected solutions were prepared at critical micelle concentration of surfactants. During the flooding tests, high quality pictures were taken with a camera connected to the computer to monitor the motion of injected solution in the micromodel.Main 40% oil recovery was achieved after biosurfactant flooding while SDBS, SDS, CTAB and DTAB resulted 36%, 34%, 32% and 29% oil recovery, respectively. For mechanistic study, the surface tension (ST) and viscosity measurements were performed and contact angle was determined. The surface tension reduction, wettability alteration towards more water-wet condition and increasing the ratio of injected fluid viscosity to oil viscosity were dominant mechanisms. The rhamnolipid was more effective than other surfactants in reduction of surface tension and altering the wettability towards favorable water-wet conditions. It decreased the surface tension of water from 72 to 28 mN/m, which was the least comparing to other surfactants and increased the capillary number about 19.4 times greater than in water flooding. Additionally, it changed the contact angle from 106 to 6, 94.3%, the widest change among applied surfactants.