Using Polymer Alternating Gas to Maximize CO2 Flooding Performance

Abstract

Abstract Carbon dioxide (CO2) has been used commercially to recover oil from reservoirs by enhanced oil recovery (EOR) technologies for over 40 years. Currently, CO2 flooding is the second most applied EOR processes in the world behind steamflooding. Water alternating gas (WAG) injection has been a popular method to control mobility and improve volumetric sweep efficiency for CO2 flooding. The average improved recovery is about 9.7%, with a range of 6 to 20% for miscible WAG injection. Despite all the success of WAG injection, sweep efficiency during CO2 flooding is typically a challenge to reach higher oil recovery and better apply the technology. This paper proposes a new combination method called polymer alternating gas (PAG) to improve the volumetric sweep efficiency of the WAG process. The feature of this new method is that polymers are added to water during the WAG process to improve mobility ratio. In the PAG process, polymer flooding and immiscible/miscible CO2 injection are combined. To analyze the feasibility of PAG, models considering both miscible and polymer flooding processes are built to study the performance of PAG. In this paper, the sensitivity of polymer adsorption and concentration are studied. The feasibility of PAG in reservoirs with different permeabilities, different Dykstra-Parsons permeability variation coefficients (VDPs), and different fluids are also studied. A reservoir model from a typical section of the North Burbank Unit (NBU) is used to compare the performance between PAG, WAG, and polymer flooding. This study demonstrates that PAG can significantly improve recovery for immiscible/miscible flooding in homogeneous or heterogeneous reservoirs.