Abstract
Enhanced oil recovery (EOR) generates a large amount of produced water with emulsified oil, that must be treated before its final disposition. Polymer flooding is a chemical EOR method that is used to improve oil production, and these polymers can reportedly hinder the produced water treatment step. Flocculants are used to treat the produced water, and this work proposed to evaluate the EOR produced water treatment and the impact of the EOR polymers molar masses on the oil removal efficiency. For that, partially hydrolyzed polyacrylamide (HPAM) with different molar masses were used as the EOR polymer, while the flocculant used was a Polyethylenimine (PEI), an underexplored flocculant in oil industry. HPAM was evaluated in two concentrations (100 and 1000 ppm), under two different conditions: sheared and non-sheared. Flocculation with PEI was carried out in a Jartest equipment followed by Dissolved air flotation (DAF). The best oil removal results were achieved at 100 ppm concentration of HPAM, under shearing conditions.
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