Polymer Flooding
Description:
Improve macroscopic sweep efficiency with water soluble polymers to increase oil production rate and accelerate recovery.
Application:
Reservoirs suffering of water channeling issues due to poor mobility control of water (viscous oil and/or unfavorable relative permeability)
Results:
With the successes of the Daqing and Pelican Lake projects, two full-field polymer flood implementations, the EOR Alliance has demonstrated its capability in designing successful polymer flood projects. The design includes reservoir characterization, laboratory study, modeling (PumaFlow software), recommendation for surface facility and on-field assistance.
Issues
- Need to select stable polymers (chemically and mechanically) in reservoir conditions
- Potential injectivity issues related to operational constraints or reservoir characteristics.
- Polymer behavior in the reservoir (simulations and forecast)
Need
- Performance evaluation workflow for polymer selection, injection strategy definition and data generation for reservoir simulation
- Anticipate any potential operational issues (injectivity, viscosity loss, polymer degradation, etc.)
- Evaluate the process through reservoir simulation including reservoir characterization/history matching, 1D to 3D simulations
Objective
- Reduce risks of failure through careful preparation, stepwise implementation and continuous monitoring.
- Extend the application of Polymer Flooding to difficult reservoir conditions (heavy oil, high salinity, high hardness, low permeability formations, high temperatures, etc.) considering readily available commercial EOR polymers.
- Demonstrate that for new developments, EOR scenarios should be considered early.
