Application of Novel Surfactants with Co-Solvent Character for Heavy Oil Recovery
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract A new class of ultra-short hydrophobe surfactants with co-solvent character was investigated as a sole additive to conventional polymer flooding for heavy oil recovery. No alkali was used for emulsification. The surfactants tested are composed of a short hydrophobe (phenol in this research) extended by a small number of propylene oxide (PO) and sufficient ethylene oxide (EO) units to achieve aqueous stability: phenol-xPO-yEO. Results are presented for the selection of ultra-short hydrophobe surfactants, aqueous stability, emulsion phase behavior, and oil-displacement through a glass-bead pack at 368 K. Results show that 2 wt% phenol-4PO-20EO was able to reduce the interfacial tension between oil and NaCl brine to 0.39 dynes/cm, in comparison to 11 dynes/cm with no surfactant, at 368 K. Water flooding, 70-cp polymer flooding, and surfactant-improved polymer flooding were conducted for displacement of 276-cp oil through a glass-bead pack that represents the clean-sand faces of a heavy oil reservoir in Alberta, Canada. The oil recovery at 2 pore-volumes of injection was 84% with the surfactant-improved polymer flooding, which was 54% and 22 % greater than the water flooding and the polymer flooding, respectively. Results suggest a new opportunity of enhanced heavy oil recovery by adding a slug of one non-ionic surfactant with co-solvent character to conventional polymer flooding.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".