Economical Comparison of surfactant and water Flooding

Although waterflooding is an effective process,surfactant flooding is used to recover oil from reservoirs by wettability alteration and interfacialtension reduction. Surfactants have been identifiedwhich can lower the IFT between oil and aqueous phase. The reduction of IFT leads to mobilization ofthe oil by buoyancy forces. In all the enhanced oil recovery processes, flow of displacing and displaced fluid in a petroleum reservoir is affected by thewettability of the reservoir rock. Economical effectiveness is a main challenge in feasibility of any EOR method. In this study, weinvestigate the economical efficiency of bothsurfactant and water flooding by algorithm genetic optimization. One of the important optimization variables is well placement. Determining of the location of new wells is a complicated problem which depends on reservoir and fluid properties.Various methods have been suggested for thisproblem. Among these, direct optimization, although accurate, is impossible due to the number ofsimulation required.Optimal placement of up to three surfactant injection wells was studied at two fields. One of the Iranian conventional field and a hypothetic fractured field.Injection rate and injection time was also optimized. The net present value of the surfactant and water flooding projects was used as the objective function.Profits and costs during the time period of the projectwere taken into consideration.