Injection of emulsions into cores packed with ottawa sand and berea sandstone as a method for enhanced oil recovery

The use of preformed emulsions in enhanced oil recovery (EOR) processes is a novel technique in the Oil Industry aimed at, by means of the flow of injected water, increasing the sweeping volume and improving the effciency of oil displacement. Oil-inwater (O/W) emulsions have shown good EOR performance, for they can better the water injection profile through the selective plugging process. In the present work, two O/W emulsion systems with drop size less than 6 μm were evaluated to be used as part of an enhanced oil recovery method. Oil recovery tests were run through a forced imbibition study simulating secondary and tertiary oil recovery processes in porous media such as packed cells with Ottawa sand and Berea sandstone cores. The results show that the emulsions exhibited higher recovery percentage in Berea sandstone than the one obtained with Ottawa-sand-packed cores. The crude-oil-based emulsion showed recovery effciency above 18.1 % in Berea sandstone at a flow rate of 0.16 cm3/min at 80 ºC.