Enhanced Oil Recovery

Otherwise known as improved oil recovery or tertiary recovery, EOR is crucial for recovering the maximum oil that is available and its importance is increasing as the easy-to-access reservoirs of oil and gas become depleted.

The success of EOR maximises the amount of oil that is recovered from a reservoir, extending this finite resource. There are a number of methods used to recover the oil including chemical injection, gas injection, microbial injection, and thermal recovery by steam injection (cyclic and flooding).

When looking to increase the produced oil from an oilfield, our surfactants for enhanced oil recovery offer solutions to maximise oil recovery. Our largest range of chemistries for EOR includes emulsifiers and inverters which are used to produce polymers for EOR applications. The polymerisation process involves the solubilisation of monomers in the water phase followed by emulsification in a continuous oil phase using primary and secondary emulsifiers. The polymerisation reaction is initiated, and when the reaction reaches completion inverters are added to help to release the polymer into water.

Processes and formulations for the inverse emulsion polymerisation of water soluble polymers vary considerably dependent on many factors. For more information on our product offering for enhanced oil recovery please visit out Water Treatment website.

Specifically within alkaline surfactant polymer (ASP) flooding, we provide demulsifiers and deoiling technologies to help recover oil from challenging conditions. In addition, due to the difficult nature of this application we have proven case studies of working with our customers on specific oil samples to provide working solutions on a case by case basis.