Pubei Block, which is a subdivision of Daqing Oilfield, presents a challenging environment for conformance control due to its high temperature (average 80 °C) and salinity (13,451 mg/L), making it difficult for the polyacrylamide-based gel to maintain the necessary gel strength. To address this issue, this study aims to evaluate the feasibility of using a terpolymer in situ gel system that provides greater temperature and salinity resistance and pore adaptation. The terpolymer used here consists of acrylamide, acrylamido-2-methylpropane sulfonic acid, and N,N'dimethylacrylamide. We determined that a formula with a hydrolysis degree of 15.15%, a polymer concentration of 600 mg/L, and a polymer−cross-linker ratio of 2.8 yields the greatest gel strength. The hydrodynamic radius of the gel was found to be 0.39 μm, indicating no conflict with the pore and pore-throat sizes determined by the CT scan. In the core-scale evaluation, the gel treatment improved oil recovery by 19.88%, of which 9.23% was through gelant injection and 10.65% through post water injection. A pilot test began in 2019 and has continued for 36 months until now. Within this period, the oil recovery factor increased by 9.82%. The number is likely to keep going up until the water cut (so far 87.4%) reaches the economic limit.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.