Publications

Previous studies of the vibration stimulation demonstrates promising changes the rock properties such as porosity and residual oil saturation. This paper presents a new idea which is similar to a washing machine, combinining vibration stimulation with surfactant injection in order to drastically reduce oil-water interfacial tension such that the oil recovery increases. Anionic surfactant is used in the experiments due to the availability of that material in the laboratory.In these experiments, vibration stimulation is applied to field core samples together with injection of various surfactant concentrations, simultaneously. Field core samples at depth 5717 - 5720 ft are used. The oververburden pressure is 100 psi, while solid content of anionic surfactant is 63%. Injection rate is 2.0 - 3.0 cc/minute by mercury pump. Of the four frequencies tested, frequency of 10 Hz is optimum in increasing the oil recovery factor. Four concentrations of anionic surfactant with 63% solid content were applied ranging from 0.5% to 2% weight. The combination of the two methods shows that the incremental oil recovery can be obtained in excess of 12.5% and with a reduction of residual oil saturation up to 0.062 fractions or 10.36%. These study results yield an encouraging indication that this new EOR method should be investigated further.