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Experimental Investigation of New Polymers for Enhanced Oil Recovery from one of the Iranian Oil Reservoirs

Torkaman, Mohammad | 2011

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  1. Type of Document: M.Sc. Thesis
  2. Language: Farsi
  3. Document No: 42523 (06)
  4. University: Sharif University of Technology
  5. Department: Chemical and Petroleum Engineering
  6. Advisor(s): Ramazani Saadatabadi, Ahmad; Masihi, Mohsen; Ghazanfari, Mohammad Hossein; Rasaei, Mohammad Reza
  7. Abstract:
  8. Polymer flooding is a famous enhanced oil recovery method and is used to reduce mobility ratio of displacing fluid to displaced fluid by forming a stable front in displacing process. Due to high costs, polymer flooding faces economical risks and from this point of view, performance investigation of polymer flooding in laboratory scale was concerned. In this project, performance of 7 types of polymers which have different rheological properties were investigated in fractured/non-fractured carbonated and sandstone reservoirs. These polymers consists of 4 commercial polymers, one branched polymer, one synthetic polymer and one polymer composite which have different molecular weight, hydrolyzation percentage, molecular diameter and sulfonation percentage. According to results, effect of these parameters on recovery was studied. Mobility is highly related to polymer molecular weight and due to this reason, polymers with 5.7 to 30 million Daltons which consists wide range of molecular weights were used. Appropriate polymer is selected for any reservoir by considering results. Branched and synthetic polymers, which can be a proper candidate for a specific case, were made in Polymer Laboratory of Sharif University of Technology. Molecular diameter of polymers was determined by an empirical correlation and apparent pore diameter of each sample was determined by present correlations and effect of these two parameters was investigated. In the next part of this research, polymer injection was done by different slug size of polymers which have different molecular weight, hydrolyzation percentage and sulfonation percentage. Their recoveries were compared with each other and effect of polymer slug size was investigated. In the other part of this research, polymer was injected before and after flooding process in order to find an optimized place in reservoir for application of polymer. The results show that branched polymer for fractured carbonate sample have much better results compared with sandstone and carbonate samples. Hydrolyzed polymers in all three cases showed acceptable results, while the sulfonated polymers will have a weaker performance in fractured media with compared to non-fractured environments. Synthetic polymer because of having a low molecular diameter in low permeable and high porosity reservoirs will be efficient and have good results. Simultaneous use of hydrolyzed and sulfonated polymers in homogeneous reservoirs has improved the performance of polymer flooding. It has been observed that by increasing the size of polymer slug, the amount of oil recovery increases but slope of this increase gradually decreases. The results also show that there is an improvement in oil recovery by polymer injection at the beginning of flooding process compared with polymer injection after water flooding
  9. Keywords:
  10. Enhanced Oil Recovery ; Viscosity ; Polymers ; Water Flooding ; Carbonate Resrevoirs

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