Open AccessEvaluation of Polymer Flooding in a Highly Stratified Heterogeneous Reservoir. A Field Case Study
Author(s) -
Jorge Andres Navas Guzman,
Bruno Ramon Batista Fernandes,
Mojdeh Delshad,
Kamy Sepehrnoori,
J. F. Zapata
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
wseas transactions on environment and development
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.157
H-Index - 19
eISSN - 2224-3496
pISSN - 1790-5079
DOI - 10.37394/232015.2020.16.3
Subject(s) - petroleum engineering , flooding (psychology) , reservoir simulation , enhanced oil recovery , oil in place , environmental science , oil field , water injection (oil production) , geology , petroleum , psychology , paleontology , psychotherapist
Oil and gas companies are looking for proven hydrocarbon reserves from their mature drained reservoirs to extend the production and economic life of these fields. The chemical enhanced oil recovery (CEOR) is an attractive water-based EOR method for these mature fields. The polymer flooding (PF) is a widely applied process in reservoirs with low sweep efficiency after the water flooding (WF). The target Colombian field has one of the first polymer pilots in the region with positive results of oil recovery in “A” sands. Thus, the operator is interested in the expansion of PF for the same reservoir and even in deeper reservoir sands. This paper focuses in the evaluation of different scenarios of PF for the producer in layers A and B with a mechanistic simulation model, thus obtaining new recommendations for the recovery strategy in the field. A sector model was constructed from a full field model using a commercial reservoir simulator to the in-house chemical flooding reservoir simulator: UTCHEMRS. This sector model was also migrated to a second commercial simulator allowing a performance comparison for these three simulators. UTCHEMRS model results were compared with the commercial simulators through the history matching (HM) phase. The primary and waterflood history match was in agreement with the field data. Simulation results suggested that PF for the base case in “A” sands presented an incremental oil recovery of up to 12% additional to water flooding. Additionally, PF was extended to the lower layer “B” sand to investigate the potential of polymer injection. The PF injection in both reservoirs simultaneously loses sweep efficiency and decreases the oil recovery to about 3%. However, a hypothetical case of new infill producer wells with the objective of testing the individual reservoir performance has revealed that PF is having significant upside from B sands as well.