SP for Heavy Oil
Description:
Increase oil production of heavy oil reservoirs while minimizing operational issues using alkali free surfactant-polymer flooding.
Application:
Heavy oil reservoirs where thermal methods are not applicable. From Primary to Tertiary recovery.
Results:
Oil recovery of a Canadian Heavy oil greater than 90 % ROIP (after polymer flush) has been obtained at lab scale with the injection of a surfactant-polymer (SP) slug.
Issues
- Chemical EOR is far to be a mature technique for Heavy and Extra-Heavy oil
- In-situ Surfactant generation with Alkali is attractive but raises scaling, corrosion and logistics concerns
- Heavy oil mobilization and transport in the reservoir by mean of SP/ASP are challenging to predict by numerical simulation
Need
- Surfactant/polymer formulation ensuring good mobility control and low interfacial tension.
- To be able to perform relevant economical feasibility assessments by reservoir simulation
Objective
- To develop SP solutions for selected representative cases
- To improve the predictivity of simulations models for mobilization and transport of heavy oil
- To determine, on selected representative cases, if secondary or post-polymer flooding SP injections are viable
- To improve Polymer Flooding.
