Experimental Study on the Physical Performance and Flow Behavior of Decorated Polyacrylamide for Enhanced Oil Recovery

Abstract

With the rapid growth of energy consumption, enhanced oil recovery (EOR) methods are continually emerging, the most effective and widely used was polymer flooding. However, the shortcomings were gradually exposed. A novel decorated polyacrylamide might be a better alternative than polymer. In this work, the molecular structure and the properties reflecting the viscosity of decorated polyacrylamide, interfacial tension, and emulsification were examined. In order to better understand the interactions between decorated polyacrylamide and oil as well as the displacement mechanism, the displacement experiment were conducted in the etched-glass microscale model. Moreover, the coreflooding comparison experiments between decorated polyacrylamide and polymer were performed to investigate the displacement effect. The statistical analysis showed that the decorated polyacrylamide has excellent characteristics of salt tolerance, viscosity stability, and viscosification like polymer. Besides, the ability to reduce the interfacial tension in order 10 −1 and emulsification, which were more similar to surfactant. Therefore, the decorated polyacrylamide was a multifunctional polymer. The displacement process captured by camera illustrated that the decorated polyacrylamide flooded oil mainly by means of 'pull and drag', 'entrainment', and 'bridging', based on the mechanism of viscosifying, emulsifying, and viscoelasticity. The results of the coreflooding experiment indicated that the recovery of decorated polyacrylamide can be improved by approximately 11-16% after water flooding when the concentration was more than 800 mg/L, which was higher than that of conventional polymer flooding. It should be mentioned that a new injection mode of 'concentration reduction multi-slug' was first proposed, and it obtained an exciting result of increasing oil production and decreasing water-cut, the effect of conformance control was more significant.

Recent Advances in Functional Polymer Materials for Energy, Water, and Biomedical Applications: A Review

“…A hydrogel polymer is injected into the reservoir to increase the viscosity of the fluid that contains water, making that fluid more difficult to flow than the oil, thereby increasing the production of oil. The most common polymer that is used for this application is one or more of the polyacrylamide group [113,114]. A typical polymer flood project involves the mixing and injecting of polymer over an extended period of time until about 30 to 50% of the pore volume of the reservoir has been injected.…”

“…A variety of these products is available from several manufacturers. In general, the performance of a polyacrylamide depends on its molecular weight and its degree of hydrolysis [113,114,118]. Partially hydrolyzed polyacrylamide (HPAM) is one of the polyacrylamide group, and it has the shape of a straight chain polymer of acrylamide monomers, some of which have been hydrolyzed.…”

Analytical solutions of polymer transport in porous media under magnetic effect

“…When a polymer is injected with water into an oil reservoir the physical properties of fluids and rocks can be changed. For example, polymer injection reduces the water mobility and thereby improving the volumetric-sweeping effect and the local displacement of the water-flood [2][3][4][5]. In addition, the dissolved polymer molecules increase the brine's viscosity, which in turn increases the water-front saturation.…”

Viscosity Loss and Hydraulic Pressure Drop on Multilayer Separate Polymer Injection in Concentric Dual-Tubing

“…Nowadays, alkali-surfactant-polymer (ASP) combinational flooding system has become a promising direction of EOR technology [8][9][10]. It was proved that the ASP flooding has improved oil recovery by 17.2% and recovery increment of SP flooding can reach 14.3% [11]. Despite the existing challenges, many researchers have studied the advances and technological method for polymer flooding in heavy oil reservoir [12][13][14] and the field application shows that the polymer flooding of heavy oils could result in incremental recoveries ranging from 7.5 to 25% OOIP [15].…”