Eventos Anais de eventos
ENCIT 2016
16th Brazilian Congress of Thermal Sciences and Engineering
SIMULATION OF VISCOELASTIC POLYMERIC SOLUTIONS INJETION PROCESS AT A RESERVOIR SCALE
Submission Author:
Julia Renha , RJ
Co-Authors:
Marcio CARVALHO, Ranena V. Ponce F.
Presenter: Julia Renha
doi://10.26678/ABCM.ENCIT2016.CIT2016-0455
Abstract
Aiming to increase the capacity of oil fields, conventional recovery methods are used. These methods consist in the injection of water or gas to maintain the reservoir pressure. The oil production typically takes place by displacing this oil in the porous media, where the displacing fluid (water) is injected to gradually occupy the space of the displaced fluid (oil).Since due to capillary effects and the heterogeneity of the porous media, a residual oil portion ends up trapped in the reservoir. These methods lead to low values of oil recovery factor, which occurs mainly by two factors: high viscosity of the reservoir’s oil in relation to the viscosity of the injected fluid and high interfacial tension between the fluids. The addition of polymers to the water ensures an increase in the viscosity of the injected fluid, improving mobility ratio between water and oil in the porous media. Thus, standardizing forward swept and improving the swept efficiency due to improved oil displacement, which reduces the formation of preferential paths in the reservoir, usually called fingers. This paper analyzes the viscoelastic behavior of the polymer, by isolating the viscous and elastic effect in function of its extension and shear rates, implemented in a polymer injection simulation model in a reservoir scale. The effect of the rheological properties of the polymer solution show in the production results a more stable injection front and consequently an oil recovery rate improvement when evaluated as a purely shear behavior. However an improvement in the recovery rate and stability of the injection front for pure extensional behavior can only be observed when the capillary number is increased considerably.
Keywords
Injection of polymer solutions, Viscoelastic behavior, Enhanced oil recovery, Simulation, Reservoir scale
