Polymers for Enhanced Oil Recovery Technology

Recently enhance oil recovery (EOR) technology is getting more attention by many countries since energy crises are getting worse and frightened. One of the reasons for this is due to the shortage of current oil resources and difficulties in finding a new oil field. Indonesia is one of the examples, before 2004 Indonesia is a net oil exporting country but after that Indonesia is a net oil importing country. The oil demand in the country is increasing while the oil production capacity is decreasing. In fact, when a new oil reservoir is drilled, the oil amount obtained from it is about 20-40% of the potential and hence there is still 60-80% oil left in the reservoir. Application of EOR technology gives an additional chance to get out more oil from the reservoir, possibly about another 20%. Polymer is the material that plays an important role in the application of EOR technology, especially surfactant and hydrogel polymers. In the technology, surfactant polymer is injected to the reservoir to reduce an interfacial tension between oil and water and is able to wipe out the trapped oil from the reservoir rock and hence increase the oil production. While an injection of hydrogel polymer to the reservoir is to increase a viscosity of fluid containing water so that the fluid is more difficult to flow than the oil, and as a result, the oil production increases. The most common polymer used for this application is polyacrylamide group.