How to Attain Ultralow Interfacial Tension and Three-Phase Behavior with a Surfactant Formulation for Enhanced Oil Recovery: a Review—Part 3. Practical Procedures to Optimize the Laboratory Research According to the Current State of the Art in Surfactant Mixing

The minimum interfacial tension to be reached in enhanced oil recovery by surfactant flooding implies the attainment of a so-called optimum formulation. Part 1 of the present review showed that this formulation may be described as a numerical correlation between the involved variables defining the oil, the water, the surfactant and the temperature. Since it is unlikely to find a single surfactant matching the crude/brine/T/P system characteristic of a reservoir, a mixture of at least two surfactant species is always used. The scan technique method to test the mixing requires about ten interfacial tension or phase behavior experiments and results in a single data. Hence, the scan experiments have to be repeated many times to find a minimum tension which is low enough, e.g. 0.001 mN/m, for the given crude oil-brine system. Part 2 of this review has shown that there are many formulation variables and thus too many possibilities to easily choose experimental conditions. Since there is no simple method to select two or more surfactant species, the choice is made from partial experience or intuition, and sometimes at random. The laboratory time and cost to reach an appropriate optimum formulation is often excessive. Part 3 of this review shows that by cleverly using a three-surfactant mixture, the experimental work to attain a very low interfacial tension for a given reservoir case can be considerably reduced. It is a matter of using the available information along a proper sequential step by step path toward the optimum.