Abstract
Summary In laboratory corefloods, polymer solutions used in EOR, such as partially hydrolyzed polyacrylamides (PHPA), often break through at less than 1 PV injected compared to the breakthrough of pure water. The rapid breakthrough is erroneously used to determine the ratio of pores accessible to polymer to total PV (accessible PV). Through numerical simulation and steady-state analysis, we show that the rapid breakthrough of such polymer solutions is not a measure of accessible PV. The only thing that can be inferred from the polymer solution breakthrough time is that polymer solution travels faster than water. Breakthrough time depends on the injected polymer concentration and shear rate. Our results significantly affect interpretation of polymer flow in porous media. Laboratory-measured polymer bulk properties are not those that should be used in conventional reservoir simulation and pressure-transient test analysis of polymer solutions. We show two different forms of the same partial differential equation used to describe rapid polymer breakthrough. The finite-difference solutions lead to two different polymer concentrations for each gridblock—a flowing concentration and a bulk (volume-average) concentration. The polymer-concentration-dependent properties required for each formulation must be interpreted correctly.
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