Neha Saxena - Natural Surfactants: Application in Enhanced Oil Recovery

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I wish to express my sincerest appreciation and gratitude to the Co-Author of this book Dr. Ajay Mandal, Professor, Department of Petroleum Engineering, for his continuous guidance, rigorous supervision, effective suggestions and the hours spent for discussing and reviewing the intricate aspects of this work.

Most importantly, my special gratitude is due to my parents, my in-laws, Siddharth Sabharwalmy life partner, and my friends for their love, blessing, encouragement and never-ending kindness which made everything easier to achieve.

I would like to pay sincere thanks to IIMT University for motivating me to develop a research-oriented aptitude and to utilize my knowledge in the right direction.

Surfactants are compounds having the properties of detergents and have been identified with human civilization. Plants or different parts of plants like stem, leaves have these detergent-like properties, e.g. soap-nut pericarp was used as a source for washing hairs, and leaves of Jatropha were crushed to use it as a source of washing clothes in Indian culture previously. Hence, it becomes very tough to report the exact time when the surfactants were identified and used by the humans. Though for man-made surfactants, their manufacturing and application are well known, and the exact time can be reported, the same cannot be said about natural surfactants.

Few historical applications of these soap-like compounds were identified around 600 B.C. Phoenicians filed the application of surfactant around 3000 years ago (Sagir et al. ). The origin of these compound has been identified in Mediterranean culture. From the beginning, the soap was manufactured using wood ash, fats and many other plant products. It has been found in the literature that surfactants from industry have been brought about 2000 years ago where they were used to neutralize animal fats. Many non-soap materials like sulphated oil were used as surface-active agents. These oils became famous with trade names like turkey red oil produced by reacting sulphuric acid with castor oil producing a form which has a polar head and long non-polar chain. During World War I, synthetic surfactants gained application to reduce the deficiency from the vegetables and animal fats produced.

In the past century, the development in the field of surfactant science boomed in the 1920s and 1930s, where the process of sulphation of long-chain alkyl and aryl alcohols was developed. The product obtained has detergent properties and was used as washing agents. By the end of World War II, the long-chain aryl sulphonates replaced the sulphates obtained from alcohol and were commercially available in the market as washing compounds. Alcoholic sulphates procured the market and found application in shampoo and personal care products.