(622d) Surfactant-Polymer System Optimization in Heterogeneous Model with Mobility Control | AIChE

(622d) Surfactant-Polymer System Optimization in Heterogeneous Model with Mobility Control

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With the development of polymer flooding in China, sections once applied flooding have entered a stage with high water content, and based on a good amount of case studies, 40 to 50 percent oil is remaining after flooding, showing a great potential to be recovered. On the other hand, reservoir after flooding shows an intensified heterogeneity and scattered remaining oil. Under this circumstance, how to effectively improve oil recovery has become a problem await to be solved.

Surfactant-Polymer flooding is an option to solve this for its ability to preclude the scaling problem and difficulties in oil-water separation caused by alkali. But still, if sole Surfactant-Polymer flooding is injected, flooding fluids may cross flow in high permeability layer and barriers may show up to initiate remaining oil in the low permeability layers. Thus, mobility control is applied in this work to work on this.

In this paper, heterogeneous models with different permeability contrast are established based on two parallel cores experiments with the idea of mobility control method to determine the optimized surfactant-polymer system respectively from several system designs: A mobility control scheme of slug combination of a high concentration of polymer and surfactant-polymer systems is designed with the principle that high concentration polymer solution is firstly injected to block the high permeability layer so that improve the Swept volume, then the subsequent solution can be injected into the low-permeability layer , initiate the remaining oil in low permeability layer, thereby improving recovery.

In this work, numerical simulation exploring the variation coefficient effect on oil displacement and distribution of remaining oil after polymer flooding was applied as assistance and validation. The numerical simulation results show that the remaining oil is greatly decreased after applying the optimized surfactant-polymer system, and the optimum schemes determined with mobility control method could further improve the recovery efficiency of after polymer flooding section in a range from12% to 20% compared with that of usage of traditional surfactant-polymer, which makes the increase of follow-up recovery of reservoir possible. Moreover, the experimental data shows a friendly agreement with the numerical results.

The model for optimization of surfactant-polymer proposed in this work could be used to enhance oil recovery in heterogeneous reservoir more effectively and since it can make surfactant-polymer work on a given target layers, it will help a lot in developing reservoir economically.

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