A General Approach to Estimating the Cost of Recovering Crude Oil by Surfactant Waterflood Techniques

This paper presents a general procedure for estimating the cost of recovering crude oil by surfactant waterflood techniques. The general procedure is illustrated by working through an example in detail. The economics of surfactant flooding is a complex function of many elements, such as surface facilities, well operations, reservoir parameters, and chemical cost. The authors identify 13 elements, explore the interactions among them, and describe a procedure for estimating the wellhead price a producer must receive for surfactant flooding to be economical. Three actual reservoir stratifications were simulated with surfactant-front-tracking model. Oil recoveries vs time vs. surfactant injection were obtained. These data were used to illustrate the effect of injection rate, oil saturations at the beginning of the surface flooding, reservoir properties such as thickness and depth, well workover, infill drilling, fracturing, chemical cost, and the discounted cash flow (DCF) rate of return on the required wellhead prices. They show what favorable combinations are needed for an economical surfactant flood.