Abstract

Polymer flooding has its superiority in heavy oil recovery due to the improvement of the mobility ratio of oil to the injected fluids. In this work, the multi-molecular mixed polymer flooding is proposed for heavy oil recovery. Firstly, the inaccessible pore volume and resistance coefficient are measured for the multi-molecular mixed polymer. The low-field nuclear magnetic (LFNMR) resonance technique is then applied to compare the performance of conventional polymer flooding and multi-molecular mixed polymer flooding for heavy oil extraction from the pore-scale perspective. Results show that the inaccessible pore of multi-molecular mixed polymer flooding is about 5.0% lower than the single molecular polymer flooding, of which the resistance coefficient is about 6.2 higher than the single molecular polymer flooding, indicating the potential of the multi-molecular mixed polymer flooding for enhancing heavy oil recovery. Moreover, the multi-molecular mixed polymer flooding shows excellent performance for heavy oil production compared to the conventional polymer flooding. Specifically, the total oil recovery for the multi-molecular mixed polymer flooding is measured about 4.2% higher than that of the conventional polymer flooding. In addition, based on the LFNMR scanning, the multi-molecular mixed polymer flooding is more efficient in extracting oil from the smaller pores. This study is expected to inspire new strategies for heavy oil recovery; more importantly, it may provide insights into the mechanism of polymer flooding for heavy oil extraction.

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