Comparison of History-Matched Water Flood, Tertiary Polymer Flood Relative Permeabilities and Evidence of Hysteresis During Tertiary Polymer Flood in Very Viscous Oils

Abstract

Abstract Polymer flooding in very viscous oil has been gaining interest since its efficiency has been field proven. Multiple laboratory investigations have evidenced that the incremental oil recovered by the tertiary process increases considerably the recovery reached thanks to water flooding. However, such tertiary injection is made all the more complex that it is preceded by unstable displacement of oil by water. Therefore a better understanding of the physics is needed, in order to better predict and optimize the viscous oil reserves associated with tertiary polymer flooding. This work presents the interpretation of three similar tertiary polymer flood experiments carried out at the Centre for Integrated Petroleum Research (CIPR, Norway). Each experiment consisted in a water flood followed by a polymer flood. They involved the same Bentheimer outcrop sandstone, 2000 cP oil, 70 cP polymer solution, 2D slab geometry, but different slab lengths (2 slabs are 30cmx30cm, 1 slab is 30cmx90cm). Saturation evolution was monitored by X-ray. On the one hand, provided simple simulation assumptions, the three water floods under study could be history matched (production, pressure). Similar ratios between water and oil relative permeabilities were found, although the water flood relative permeabilities, matched with non Corey-type curves, reflected an important variability. On the other hand, the tertiary polymer floods were found challenging to match consistently. In particular, using classic history matching approaches, the history matching of the long slab experiment could not be reconciled with that of short slab experiments. Simulations were initialized with saturation maps obtained at the end of the water floods. None of the tested approaches enabled us to match consistently the short and long slab experiments together, unless a hysteresis model was implemented. Indeed, a memory effect was observed experimentally from the quantitative analysis of X-ray saturation maps and interpreted as a hysteresis phenomenon. This simple model, with two additional matching parameters, is then further validated by the comparison of 2D simulations with measured in situ saturations.