Recovery of Crude Oil by Chemical Flooding Method using SDS and Gum Arabic Mixtures

Abstract

A group of chemicals known as surfactants are widely used in industries. Their presence in any formulation, albeit little, exhibited superior functionality of the end-products. The dual hydrophobic and hydrophilic moiety of the structure have been shown to be responsible for reduction of surface/ interfacial tension and formation of micelles. In this work, a chemical flooding method using sodium dodecyl sulphate, SDS and its mixture with gum arabic, were carried out to study the recovery and efficiency of extracting the residual oil from the oil reservoirs. Two sets of experiments namely SDS and its mixture with gum arabic flooding at concentrations of SDS between 0.1-0.6 percent by weight are conducted. The percentage of gum arabic used is 16 percent by weight. Results shows that the use of SDS-Gum arabic flooding method yielded higher extraction of oil about 4.0 percent compared to SDS flooding. This suggests that the use of SDS and gum Arabic mixture is more efficient in increasing the amount of oil recovery.