Biosurfactants produced from agriculture process waste streams to improve oil recovery in fractured carbonate reservoirs
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A study on the ability of surfactin, an anionic lipopeptide surfactant produced by Bacillus subtilis, to mediate wettability changes that positively affect oil recovery in fractured carbonate rock was carried out. Candidate benchmark surfactants include sodium laureth sulfate, sodium dodecyl sulfate, and sodium dodecylbenzene sulfonate. Surfactin was more effective than sodium laureth sulfate at changing wettability of crushed Lansing-Kansas City (LKC) material to a more water-wet state on both molar and weight bases. Sodium laureth sulfate and surfactin exhibited typical adsorption isotherms with four distinct regions. Surfactin showed higher specific adsorption onto crushed LKC than does SLS. This is an abstract of a paper presented at the SPE International Symposium on Oilfield Chemistry (Houston, TX 2/28/2007-3/2/2007).