Wettability alteration and mitigating aqueous phase trapping damage in tight gas sandstone reservoirs using mixed cationic surfactant/nonionic fluoro-surfactant solution

During drilling, completion and fracturing operations, aqueous phase from working fluids can invade into rock formations and engender phase trapping damage in the near well region. This formation damage can diminish the gas relative permeability and hinder the gas well productivity in tight gas sandstone reservoirs. In this study, we investigated the mixed surfactants system of cationic surfactant (SDCSA-1) and nonionic fluorinated surfactant (FC-0) at varied mixing mole ratios and concentrations to reduce the formation damage. Results showed that the minimum surface tension of mixed surfactants solution was relatively low with around 20 mN/m. In addition, surfactant mixtures altered the wettability of sandstone rock from water wetting to intermediate wetting condition. An optimal mixed system was obtained when the concentration is 10-4 mol/L and mole ratio of individual surfactants is 1:1. The mechanism of wettability alteration of surfactants to liquid/rock interface was further determined by adsorption experiments, atomic force microscopy(AFM) tests, and energy dispersive spectrum(EDS) tests. Two sets of spontaneous imbibition experiments were conducted including parallel imbibition tests and sequential imbibition tests. We observed that mixed surfactants solution can prominently prevent liquid invasion into sandstone rocks. We further calculated the capillary pressure to quantitatively examine the capillary effects of different imbibed fluids. When sandstone sample was treated by mixed surfactants, the capillary pressure decreased from 7.81 MPa to 0.97 MPa. Core displacement tests revealed that the liquid saturation of core sample filled with surfactants mixture decreased from 100% to 35.48% and the its gas permeability recovered to 72.86% of the core without liquid after gas flooding. NMR tests also confirmed that surfactant mixtures can be more easily drained than brine from pores in tight sandstone. Consequently, we proposed an improved method to mitigate water blocking damage based on wettability alteration by mixed cationic surfactant and nonionic fluoro-surfactant system.