Performance of Surfactant Flooding in Heterogeneous Two-Layered Porous Media

In this paper, simulation study was conducted to investigate the effect of spatial
heterogeneity of multiple porosity fields on oil recovery, residual oil and microemulsion saturation.
The generated porosity fields were fed into UTCHEM for simulating surfactant flooding in
heterogeneous two-layered porous media. From the analysis, surfactant flooding was more sensitive
than water flooding to the spatial distribution of multiple porosity fields. Residual oil saturation in
upper and lower layers after water flooding was about the same with the reservoir heterogeneity. On
the other hand, both residual oil and microemulsion saturation in the two layers after surfactant
flooding became more equal as porosity distribution standard increased. Spatial heterogeneity of
multiple porosity fields had only a small effect on residual oil saturation and recovery factor. The
variation of recovery factor due to the reservoir heterogeneity was under 4.2%.