Journal Home > Volume 3 , Issue 2

As a reservoir reaches depletion stage there will still be a varying amount of residual oil saturation in the reservoir pore volume that is too heavy to be moved and produced. This undesirable phenomenon occurs due to adverse mobility and/or viscosity ratio between displacing phase (water) and displaced phase (residual oil). A solution to that is polymer injection which has been considered as one of the most effective and successful method to improve oil recovery. Moreover polymer flooding also showed limited success when applied in heterogeneous reservoir. This is because single polymer injection cannot sweep entire porous media efficiently, therefore in this research work the effectiveness of sequential polymer injection is studied and compared with conventional single polymer injection. The reservoir property model was developed from the available well data of an example field using stochastic approach. From the base case two more property models were developed to cover the heterogeneity from slightly to very heterogeneous reservoir rock. The degree of heterogeneity was obtained for each property model using DykstraParson technique. The magnitude of Dykstra-Parson coefficient for Slightly, Moderate and Very heterogeneous were 0.24, 0.59 and 0.69, respectively. Our results indicated that injecting polymers sequentially with varying in concentrations is an effective technique for enhanced oil recovery in heterogeneous reservoir rock.


menu
Abstract
Full text
Outline
About this article

Reservoir simulation study of enhanced oil recovery by sequential polymer flooding method

Show Author's information Hiwa Sidiq( )Valan AbdulsalamZanyar Nabaz
Komar University of Science and Technology, Kurdistan Region, Iraq

Abstract

As a reservoir reaches depletion stage there will still be a varying amount of residual oil saturation in the reservoir pore volume that is too heavy to be moved and produced. This undesirable phenomenon occurs due to adverse mobility and/or viscosity ratio between displacing phase (water) and displaced phase (residual oil). A solution to that is polymer injection which has been considered as one of the most effective and successful method to improve oil recovery. Moreover polymer flooding also showed limited success when applied in heterogeneous reservoir. This is because single polymer injection cannot sweep entire porous media efficiently, therefore in this research work the effectiveness of sequential polymer injection is studied and compared with conventional single polymer injection. The reservoir property model was developed from the available well data of an example field using stochastic approach. From the base case two more property models were developed to cover the heterogeneity from slightly to very heterogeneous reservoir rock. The degree of heterogeneity was obtained for each property model using DykstraParson technique. The magnitude of Dykstra-Parson coefficient for Slightly, Moderate and Very heterogeneous were 0.24, 0.59 and 0.69, respectively. Our results indicated that injecting polymers sequentially with varying in concentrations is an effective technique for enhanced oil recovery in heterogeneous reservoir rock.

Keywords: reservoir simulation, Polymer flooding, enhanced oil recovery (EOR), sweep efficiency

References(12)

Chung, T., Bae, W., Koh, H., et al. A Sequential polymer injection treatment using RPM: Effects of multilayer adsorption of cationic and anionic polymers. Paper SPE 151749 Presented at the SPE International Symposium and Exhibition on Formation Damage Control, Lafayette, Louisiana, USA, 15-17 February, 2012.https://doi.org/10.2118/151749-MS
DOI

Loahardjo, N., Winoto, W., Morrow, N.R. Oil recovery from Bentheim Sandstone by sequential water flooding and imbibition. Petrophysics 2013, 54(6): 547-553.

Loahardjo, N., Xie, X., Morrow, N.R. Oil recovery by sequential water flooding of mixed-wet sandstone and limestone. Energy Fuels 2010, 24(9): 5073-5080.

Loahardjo, N., Xie, X., Winoto, W., et al. Oil recovery by sequential waterflooding: The effects of aging at residual oil and initial water saturation. Paper SPE 154202 Presented at SPE Improved Oil Recovery Symposium, Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA, 14-18 April, 2012.https://doi.org/10.2118/154202-MS
DOI
Mogensen, K., Hood, P., Jones, R.A., et al. Gas injection project in the Kharaib B Reservoir of the Giant Al Shaheen Field. Paper SPE129565 Presented at the SPE EOR Conference at Oil & Gas West Asia, Muscat, Oman, 11-13 April, 2010.https://doi.org/10.2118/129565-MS
DOI

Mousavifar, A.M., Kharrat, R., Parchizedeh, A., et al. Comparison between EOR methods (gas Injection, water injection and WAG processes) in one of Iranian Fractured oil reservoirs. Int. J. Sci. Eng. Res. 2012, 3(4): 503-507.

Muggeridge, A., Cockin, A., Webb, K., et al. Recovery rates, enhanced oil recovery and technological limits. Philos. Trans. 2014, 372: 1-25.

Olajire, A.A. Review of ASP EOR (alkaline surfactant polymer enhanced oil recovery) technology in the petroleum industry: Prospects and challenges. Energy 2014, 77(C): 963-982.

Sidiq, H.H., Amin, R. A method for enhancing the RPM performance in matrix reservoir. Paper SPE 114432 Presented at the Asia Pacific Oil and Gas Conference and Exhibition, Perth, Australia, 20-22 October, 2008.https://doi.org/10.2118/114432-MS
DOI
Sun, Y., Saleh, L., Bai, B. Measurement and impact factors of polymer rheology in porous media. Petroleum Engineering Program, Missouri University of Science and Technology, pp. 188-201, 2012.https://doi.org/10.5772/35715
DOI

Tunio, S.Q., Tunio, A., Ghirano, N.A., et al. Comparison of different enhanced oil recovery techniques for better oil productivity. Int. J. Appl. Sci. Technol. 2011, 1(5): 143-153.

Willhite, G.P. Waterflooding (SPE textbook series). Society of Petroleum Engineers, 1986.
Publication history
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Rights and permissions

Publication history

Received: 29 October 2018
Revised: 27 November 2018
Accepted: 03 December 2018
Published: 09 December 2018
Issue date: June 2019

Copyright

© The Author(s) 2019

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to acknowledge the financial support provided by NGK for conducting this research program. The author would also like to acknowledge Petex Company for providing the Komar University of Science and Technology with educational licenses for all of their software suites. The author highly appreciates the valuable comments and feedbacks of Mr Mark Rank in preparing the manuscript.

Rights and permissions

This article is distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY-NC-ND) license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Return