Laboratory Investigation of Gel Polymer Performance in Enhanced Oil Recovery

Water production is one of the serious problems in production of oil and gas reservoirs. Water coning in oil wells not only causes oil production reduction, but also increasing separation costs and equipments maintenance. Above all in many cases caused the oil production cut off and much oil remain in the reservoir that is not producible. Nowadays, the use of gel polymers becomes very important due to prevent water and gas production in oil wells and water production in gas wells. One of the reasons that make gel polymer's performance become successful is its ability to reduce water permeability more than oil permeability that this phenomenon is called disproportionate permeability reduction (DPR). This research is laboratory survey of gel polymer's performance order to prevent water producing in enhanced oil recovery (EOR). In this study, two series of experiments were performed on different samples. The first series includes three phase experiment on plug and the second series includes four phase experiment on hole core samples. The results show that the gel polymer seal time and the viscosity of gel polymers are two fundamental factors in experiments. Because, if gel polymers do not have suitable seal time could not be diffused in to the fractures and was sealed before reaching the region was fractured by water. Also, if the gel polymer composition does not have suitable viscosity, many problems would happen during water injection. These problems include pressure increasing (due to high viscosity) and production in injection wells (due to low viscosity). In spite of these problems, the results show that after injecting gel polymer, averagely oil recovery increases about %7.68.

کلیدواژه ها:

water coning ، gel polymer ، permeability ، viscosity ، enhanced oil recovery (EOR