A mathematical model to evaluate the polymer flooding performances

Afshin Davarpanah,Behnam Mirshekari

doi:10.1016/j.egyr.2019.09.061

Afshin Davarpanah, Behnam Mirshekari

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.egyr.2019.09.061

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Journal: Energy Reports	Publication Date: Sep 30, 2019
Citations: 33	License type: cc-by

Affiliation: Islamic Azad University, Tehran

Abstract

Due to the enormous demand for crude oil, the selection of appropriate and economical techniques to enhance the oil recovery are always considered as the major concerns in reservoir developments. Polymer flooding is considered as one of the chemical enhanced oil recovery techniques especially for heavy oil reservoirs by the sweep efficiency improvement. The objective of this study is to perform a mathematical model to evaluate the polymer flooding performances in the presence of saturation profile and cross flow effect to validate the accuracy of the model with simulated field data. Thereby, the results of this developed model indicate that the model is approximately matched with the simulated field data rather than previous models. Furthermore, some geological problems such as high permeable channeling and semi-sealing issues are considered in the model to calculate the pressure integral and how each parameter would change regarding the cumulative pore volume alteration. Consequently, the proposed model would be an appropriate choice to verify the pressure integral which is compared with the simulated field data by the consideration of saturation distribution and cross flow effect.

Highlights

Due to the increasing demand for the utilization of oil in petroleum industries and other industries, the preferable enhanced oil recovery (EOR) techniques would be operated as the significant scheme for providing the sufficient volume of hydrocarbons (Abidin et al, 2012; Al-Hajri et al, 2018; Davarpanah, 2018; Davarpanah and Mirshekari, 2019b,c)
In this model, both of the cross flow effect and saturation profile is considered in the proposed model which indicated the more accuracy of the model in comparison with other models
An mathematical model was proposed to analyze the considerable influence of cross-flow interlayers and saturation profile on the polymer flooding performances

Summary

Introduction

Due to the increasing demand for the utilization of oil in petroleum industries and other industries, the preferable enhanced oil recovery (EOR) techniques would be operated as the significant scheme for providing the sufficient volume of hydrocarbons (Abidin et al, 2012; Al-Hajri et al, 2018; Davarpanah, 2018; Davarpanah and Mirshekari, 2019b,c). In respect to the way, polymer flooding is considered as the stabilized EOR processes to increase the water viscosity to reduce the fingering phenomenon which leads the oil to be more mobilized (Davarpanah and Mirshekari, 2019d; Wever et al, 2017; Yang et al, 2018; Yerramilli et al, 2013). The viscoelastic behavior of polymers is another mechanism of using polymers instead of other chemical processes The reason for this issue is related to the higher interfacial viscosity between oil and polymer rather than water-oil, and the value of shear stress is proportionally related to the interfacial viscosity, and subsequently, the polymer would exert a larger pulling force on the oil droplets which helps the oil push out of the dead-end pores (Amirian et al, 2018; Liang et al, 2017; Norouzi et al, 2017; Salehi et al, 2019; Song et al, 2015; Zampieri et al, 2019). A successful economic aspect of polymer flooding performances is utterly depended to the polymer concentration, polymer additives, and reservoir characteristics (Delshad et al, 2008; Glasbergen et al, 2015; Jacobsen et al, 2019; Li and Delshad, 2014; Tie et al, 2019; Wang et al, 2015)

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Conclusion