Water Injection, Polymer Injection and Polymer Alternating Water Injection for Enhanced Oil Recovery: A Laboratory Study

Zampieri, Marcelo Ferreira; Moreno, Rosângela Barros Zanoni Lopes

doi:10.1115/omae2013-10243

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…The authors considered the injection of a continuous polymer bank, optimizing the polymer injection starting date and bank size. However, alternate water-polymer injection cycles can also be an effective means to the injection strategy (Zampieri & Moreno, 2013). Polymer flooding could potentially lose injectivity (Seright et al, 2009;Li & Delshad, 2014;Luo et al, 2016), which can be lessened by using alternate cycles.…”

Section: Botechia Et Al (2016)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluation of Alternate Water-Polymer Injection Parameters Using Numerical Simulation

Botechia

Barreto

Lamas

et al. 2019

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Finding an efficient injection strategy using polymers to reduce water-oil mobility ratio and improve sweep efficiency relies on many parameters. To overcome the disadvantages (injectivity loss and high costs) of injecting a continuous polymer bank, an alternative is to alternate water-polymer injection cycles, combining the benefits of water flooding (better injectivity) and polymer flooding (better sweep). A common approach is the injection of a continuous polymer bank after a period of water injection. In this case, parameters of the polymer bank (i.e. duration and starting date of the bank) are control variables and must optimized for the strategy. This work (1) evaluates the impact of alternate water-polymer injection parameters and (2) analyzes the viability of using alternate water-polymer cycles to improve the performance of the polymer flooding strategy, previously optimized for continuous injection bank. We analyze the cycle period, starting date of the cycle, and initial injected fluid using net present value (NPV) and other indicators (cumulative oil and water productions and cost of polymer injection). We apply the study to two reservoir models based on offshore heavy oil fields. The results show that cycle parameters can impact strategy performance significantly and that proper evaluation can benefit production. We observed that reducing the cycle period helped maintain injection flow at higher levels, avoiding the reduction of oil production by pressure depletion. We also noted that the cycle must start in the first years after the beginning of injection. It is important to identify the most influential parameters to set injection levels to support beneficial effects of both methods, and adjust the optimum amount of polymer to be injected.

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Section: Botechia Et Al (2016)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluation of Alternate Water-Polymer Injection Parameters Using Numerical Simulation

Botechia

Barreto

Lamas

et al. 2019

BJPG

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“…Under this injection scheme, two ways of injection appear (a) constant viscosity injection and (b) graded viscosity injection (See Figure 2.2). Other schemes in the literature are the polymer injection alternating water (Zampieri and Moreno, 2013) and the cyclical graded viscosity injection (Zheng et al, 2020).…”

Section: Temporary Polymer Injectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessment of grading polymer injection by simulation at laboratory scale

Alvaro Choquejahua Salcedo

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When the mobility ratio is unfavorable, or the heterogeneity in the reservoir is high, the water flooding losses its effectivity causing early water breakthrough and low recovery factors.Polymer flooding improves the unfavorable mobility ratio by increasing the water viscosity and reducing the permeability to water due to polymer adsorption. Typically, these projects inject a finite volume of the polymer due to economic aspects since the polymer cost predominantly affects operation expenditures. However, this injection scheme can present an abrupt viscosity transition at the polymer slug tailing. The chase water can form fingers, bypassing the polymer slug and destroying its integrity. Thus, grading viscous injection is proposed to mitigate that issue. Polymer slugs with different concentrations are sequentially injected, followed by chase water. According to the literature, graded polymer schemes are not usual in the field, and only a few studies are available at the laboratory scale, including simulation. This dissertation evaluates the viscous grading polymer scheme by numerical simulation at a laboratory scale through performance indicators. The specific objectives are to build a comprehensive workflow that integrates laboratory data and validates the proposed procedures on three experimental tests reported in the literature.The proposed workflow includes three parts. The input data preparation section describes how to integrate the data from rock-fluid studies and single-and two-phase polymer core floods to calculate the parameters required by the simulator. The simulation grid selection describes the usage of static and dynamic grids to reduce the numerical dispersion and speed up the simulation runs. And finally, the history matching stage presents a workflow to fit the model systematically.The results demonstrate the workflow applicability by simultaneously fitting the cumulative oil, water, and differential pressure histories of the graded and continuous flooding schemes. The integration of cumulative volume and pressure responses allowed detecting key events, and the dynamic grid amalgamation reduced the computational time compared with the static grid. The performance indicators based on fitted models helped identify the most efficient injection scheme according to the polymer mass used, oil recovery, injected/produced water, and injectivity compared to water flooding. The three-slugs strategy performed better than the two-slug one. The proposed workflow integrating laboratory data can be helpful to the researchers involved with core floods and small-scale simulation and, also, with modeling and simulations at pilot and field scales.

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Using polymer-alternating-water to maximize polymer flooding performance

Dong,

Pan,

et al. 2024

J Petrol Explor Prod Technol

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Polymer flooding has proved an effective technique to improve development efficiency in heterogeneous reservoirs. Previously, operators usually employed continuous injection of large polymer slugs. However, problems existed including premature injection profile reversal during development, ineffective circulation of polymer solution in low-permeability zones, and excessive polymer consumption in the late development stage. The paper proposed a combination method, named as polymer-alternating-water (PAW), to solve the issues of traditional polymer flooding. The characteristic of this method is injecting water slugs between polymer slugs during the polymer flooding process. At present, research on the PAW technique is limited, with the operational parameters, oil recovery mechanisms, and applicability under various reservoir conditions remaining unclear. In this work, a numerical polymer flooding model is developed using the commercial CMG-STARS reservoir simulation module to investigate the oil displacement performance of PAW. Numerical simulations are performed to determine the optimal parameters for maximizing oil recovery factor. The results indicated compared with continuous polymer flooding, PAW shows multiple peaks in daily oil production rate, with a significantly decreased decline rate, resulting in a 1.47% increase in recovery factor. Under different reservoir conditions including mean permeability, heterogeneity, and crude oil viscosity, PAW can achieve further improvements on the basis of continuous polymer flooding. Polymer adsorption and injection concentration significantly impact the recovery factor, requiring further optimization for field applications. In this study, better polymer flooding performance was achieved when the number of alternating cycles of PAW was 2, and the injected alternating water slug volume was 50%. This study contributes to a deeper understanding of the key mechanisms and parameters in PAW enhanced oil recovery process, thereby providing guidance for the further optimization and field application of this technique.

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Water Injection, Polymer Injection and Polymer Alternating Water Injection for Enhanced Oil Recovery: A Laboratory Study

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

Evaluation of Alternate Water-Polymer Injection Parameters Using Numerical Simulation

Evaluation of Alternate Water-Polymer Injection Parameters Using Numerical Simulation

Assessment of grading polymer injection by simulation at laboratory scale

Using polymer-alternating-water to maximize polymer flooding performance

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