CHALLENGES

For decades, petroleum-based surfactants and chemicals have dominated maintenance and well stimulation treatments to facilitate the recovery of hydrocarbons. Most production-related chemicals (e.g., flowback aids, emulsion breakers and corrosion, paraffin/wax and asphaltene inhibitors) rely on these surface-active chemicals for their effectiveness. Surfactants reduce interfacial tension and change wettability, making them essential additives for drilling, completions and production chemistry markets as flowback aids, paraffin dispersants and stimulation chemicals to mobilize residual, immobile oil from conventional and unconventional reservoirs.

  • Biosurfactant – Higher Standard

    The performance of these chemically derived surfactants was sufficient to meet the demands of the oil industry for many years. However, today’s changing operating conditions, including low-porosity, HP/HT reservoirs—combined with the drive for environmentally friendly, sustainable, biodegradable and cost-effective compounds—have created the need for new advances in surfactant technologies, namely biosurfactants. Biosurfactants are surface-active amphiphiles with polar (hydrophilic) and nonpolar (hydrophobic) groups of substances produced by microorganisms using advanced biotechnology. Biosurfactants produced in situ in the reservoir by microbes have been an accepted practice for decades, with microbial EOR (MEOR) first patented in 1946. By 2007 a MEOR review showed a 78% success in EOR across U.S. wells from the production in the reservoir of microbial metabolites, such as nonionic and anionic microbial surfactants, which offer a variety of functions and characteristics unmatched by chemical surfactants. In the MEOR process, microbes and nutrients were injected into oil wells in an attempt to produce biosurfactants in situ. However, the results were inconsistent as the microbial generation of biosurfactants were difficult to control. These challenges triggered a new industry need: a way to produce these metabolites at scale and of consistent quality in a more controlled environment (ex situ) and then apply them where needed in a similar manner to traditional synthetic surfactants.

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  • Green Profile

    The use of biosurfactants as alternatives to petroleum-based surfactants in oilfield applications has grown throughout the past decade. Aside from their green profile, biosurfactants are highly attractive as excellent wetting agents and have remarkably low critical micelle concentrations (minimum effective dosage rates), which reduce surface and interfacial tensions to extremely low levels.

    Significant Advantages

    Naturally derived biosurfactant offers significant advantages over synthetic surfactants, such as enhanced performance, environmental compatibility, low toxicity, biodegradability and maintained activity under extreme conditions of temperatures, salinity and pH values. Biosurfactants are also low cost, completely biodegradable and leave no toxic waste from their production processes.

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  • Multiple Mechanisms

    The advantages of biosurfactants come from their multiple mechanisms of action, including penetrating much deeper into the oil reservoir to reduce viscosity, dispersing blockages, changing interfacial tensions and oil/water contact angles, and mobilizing otherwise immobile oil, ultimately increasing production. These biosurfactants replace and outperform traditional, synthetic counterparts at a fraction of the dosage rates (in some tests as little as 1/50th of the dosages of traditional surfactants) and with no hazardous effects to the environment.

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Superior Environmental Profile

  • • Zero impact on water

  • • Zero impact on soil

  • • Zero impact to marine species

  • • Biodegradable and non-toxic

Low Dosage Rates

BERO™ are typically injected at low dosage rates into the reservoir in controlled cyclic imbibition, where a biosurfactant is pumped into the well, allowed to soak for a few days and then allowed to flow back. The action of the biosurfactant changes the wettability of the reservoir, reducing the interfacial tension or drag between the oil and reservoir rock to mobilize otherwise immobile oil. Conventional and tight sand reservoir wells treated in a variety of basins have shown oil production increases of over 45% in more than 90% of the treated wells, together with the elimination of flow assurance problems such as paraffin/wax and asphaltene deposition.

Cost Reduction

Despite today’s commodity price level, the industry’s focus has turned to the total cost management of operations and the need to function within a cash flow threshold. Flow assurance and production formulas aim to provide customized treatments that balance performance, environmental risks and requirements for significant cost reduction. With the availability of biosurfactants such as BERO™, the operator no longer must choose between environmentally friendly products and treatments with effective results.  Prime performance plus sustainability can be the norm rather than an alternative.