Commercial Implementation of Chemical Flooding in Daqing Oilfield, China, and Its Future

Abstract

Abstract Chemical enhanced oil recovery(EOR) such as polymer flooding and alkali/surfactant/polymer(ASP) flooding have been applied throughout the world for more than several decades. However, few large-scale successes of these technologies have been reported, except in China. The annual crude oil production rate by chemical EOR in Daqing Oilfield has been kept over 10.0 million tonnes (~73.5 million barrels) per year for 16 consecutive years. Considerable experience has gained and lessons have learned on large-scale chemical flooding, including major factors that influence the recovery factor and methods to increase the oil recovery; measures to obtain the highest economic efficiency; and how to minimize the costs. To date, incremental oil recovered by polymer flooding is over 10.0% OOIP. Due to some disadvantages of polymer flooding, like the existence of inaccessible pore volume and lack of the EOR mechanism of ultralow interfacial tension, some substitute technologies are needed, and ASP flooding is a promising one, which was reported and proved to have an ability of recovering more than 20.0% extra oil over water flooding. However, negative scaling problems caused by alkali are severe and problematic, as a result, weak-alkali ASP (WASP) and even surfactant-polymer (SP) flooding were developed or are under development. To alleviate the bad effets of scale and further improve the performance of ASP flooding, some new technologies such as refracturing and application of new anti-scaling chemicals like compound scale removal agent were applied. SP flooding is a theoretically feasible EOR technology, but there are few field test data available, and more effective surfactants are required. In this paper, the development of commonly used chemical flooding technologies, normal problems that may merge during commercial implementation, together with the updated solutions are included. All the valuable experience obtained from commercial-scale application of chemical flooding in Daqing Oilfield is not only of great significance for the expansion of Daqing Oilfield itself, but also worth learning by other countries.