Use Of Polymer In EOR

The Three Stages Of Oil Field Development

• Primary Recovery — In Primary Recovery, oil isforced out by pressure generated from gas present in the oil.

• Secondary Recovery — In Secondary Recovery, the reservoir is subjected to water flooding or gas injection to maintain a pressure that continues to move oil to the surface.

• Tertiary Recovery — Tertiary Recovery, also known as Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR), introduces fluids that reduce viscosity and improve flow.

How much more oil can we produce from

our oil old field and wells? Would increasing your oil production from 5 bbls/day to 10 bbls/day for a 100% increase in oil production make a difference to company? 

How about going from 10 bbls/day to 50 bbls/day for a 500% increase in oil production.

That's a possibility with EOR technologies such as polymer flooding!

Enhanced Oil RecoveryIt’s a process for recovering mostly every Barrels of Oil to get out all of remaining oil in it.

And this is done by EOR technologies .

Mainly the following process are done for Enhanced oil recovery

• Water injection

• Gas injection

• Reducing residual oil saturation, SOR (alcohol, polymers, surfactants injection)

• Thermal: steam injection (to heating of the reservoir to lower the viscosity)

Enhanced Oil Recovery

Polymers flooding

Several of the leading benefits of polymer flooding include: • Improved oil recovery

• Increased "sweep efficiency"

• less water required when compared with typical water-flooding & steam injection

• Superior EOR technology with "heavy oil" formations/reservoirs with low viscosity and where Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage (SAGD) is not suitable

What is "polymer"? Poly = many mer = part So, polymer, roughly defined, means "many parts."

WHAT Polyacrylamide? Polyacrylamide powder or "PAM" is a non-toxic powder that is a long-chain molecule first used in cleaning wastewater at wastewater treatment plants. In polymer flooding, PAM makes the water “Gel" greatly improving the production of oil.

How does Polymer Flooding work?Oil and water are "immiscible" do not mix or blend with each other. This means that oil and water can NOT displace the other within an oil reservoir.

In polymer flooding, a water-soluble polymer such as Polyacrylamide or "Pam" is added to the

water in the waterflood. This increases the viscosity of the water to that of a gel making the oil and water greatly improving the efficiency of the waterflood.

The Enhanced Oil Recovery industry represents a $30 Trillion market, (in the USA) with oil priced at $100 per barrel.

Enhanced Oil Recovery revenues nearly DOUBLED, in just 4 years from $54.96 billion in 2007 to $102.02 billion in 2011!

The United States will recover more than 300 Billion Barrels of Oil through Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) technologies according to the Department of Energy.

In the next 10-15 years, 50% of the oil produced in the USA will be through Enhanced Oil Recovery technologies. And 50% of this amount will be produced by CO2-EOR.

Environmental impacts

Enhanced oil recovery wells typically produce large quantities of brine at the surface. The brine may contain toxic metals and radioactive substances, as well as being very salty. This can be very damaging to drinking water sources and the environment generally if not properly controlled.

Referenceshttp://www.polymerflooding.com/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_oil_recovery#cite_note-Hobson-1http://rockenergy.ca/Technologies/Tertiary-Recovery/index.phphttp://www.azuren-eor.com/eor/chemical-eor/http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Enhanced_oil_recovery