(59l) Optimizing Polymer Flooding in a Major Heavy Oil Carbonate Field in the Middle East

There are many heavy oil fields that hold vast economic value worldwide. However, the optimal management of these resources remains the main challenge in their development. Therefore, operating companies tend to conduct extensive studies to evaluate the most economic and feasible technical techniques prior to any operational exercise.

This research is concerned with the development of a major heavy oil field in the Middle East. The main objective of the study is to evaluate the applicability of polymer injection in carbonate reservoirs. Experimental work had been conducted as the main methodology utilized to achieve this project target.

Core flooding runs were adopted as the optimal procedure to conduct the experimental evaluation. Both core plugs and oil samples were provided by the operator, while the polymer solution was internally developed by Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research (KISR). A total of five different polymer concentration solutions were injected into the plugs to evaluate the behavior of the recovery process.

The selection of the optimal polymer concentration was then achieved by conducting a modeling exercise of the experimental outputs using (Eclipse-100) software. The model matching was achieved based on the recovery factor and pore volumes injected for three polymer solutions while the rest of the results were utilized for the model validation.

Several prediction scenarios were run to select the optimal concentration based on the breakthrough recovery factor rather than the maximum one. The reason behind this is that project’s economic value normally deteriorates after the breakthrough of the injected fluid into production wells. The study finally concluded that polymer injection is applicable for the studied reservoir and the injected solution of 0.8 % polymer concentration showed to be the optimal.