Abstract
<title>Abstract</title> <p>Nigeria currently faces significant fiscal pressure, and its domestic oil and gas industry urgently needs environmentally friendly, low-cost oil-displacement materials that can replace traditional synthetic polymers to advance enhanced oil recovery (EOR) operations. This study probes the viability of palm kernel cake (PKC), an agricultural and industrial waste with abundant local reserves, as a raw material to develop a new biopolymer for oil displacement. The research goal is to convert this agricultural by-product into an enhanced oil recovery agent optimized for controlling the mobility of displacement fluids, suitable for formations in the Niger Delta. The formulation method first extracted soluble polysaccharides from PKC. After filtration and ethanol precipitation, the polysaccharides were copolymerized with acrylamide monomers to improve the material’s stability under high temperature and high salinity conditions. A rheometer was used to characterize the material’s rheological properties, and sandstone core samples from the Niger Delta were selected to carry out displacement experiments. The results show that the material maintains stable viscosity under the critical reservoir conditions of 30000 ppm salinity and 70°C. The core experiment followed the procedural stages of brine saturation, crude oil injection to establish initial water saturation, conventional water flooding until water cut reaches 95%, and injection of a polymer fluid equal to 0.5 times the total volume of the core. The incremental oil recovery achieved by PKC-based polymer fluid samples of different viscosities compared to conventional water flooding was 29.33%, 30.25%, 39.96%, 49.6%, and 54.6%, respectively; this fully confirmed the application potential of PKC material.</p>