Insights into Heavy Oil Recovery by Surfactant, Polymer and ASP Flooding

ABSTRACT

At the end of primary production in heavy oil reservoirs, significant volumes of continuous oil remain in place. As production rates decline this EOR target has tremendous value for heavy oil producers. Many of these reservoirs are poor candidates for thermal recovery. Furthermore in regional sands or post-CHOPS systems, it may not be easy to pressurize these reservoirs for solvent-based recovery. Chemical flooding has potential for EOR in these systems, because the injection of chemicals can lead to the buildup of pressure gradients between injectors and producers, at least at the laboratory scale. These pressure gradients evolve due to improved viscosity of polymer solutions, the formation of emulsions in surfactant or AS floods, or both. The objective of this work is to improve our understanding of the mechanisms by which heavy oils are produced through chemical flooding.

Linear core floods were run on systems containing two heavy oils of variable viscosity: 500 mPa’s and 16,000 mPa’s. For the lower viscosity oil polymer floods and ASP floods are compared. These tests illustrate the impact of improving the injection fluid viscosity vs. the additional benefit from the addition of surfactant. It was observed that heavy oil is produced more efficiently from ASP flooding compared to polymer flooding alone. The residual oil saturations are lower in ASP floods, even with lower differential pressure across the core. For the higher viscosity oil some production was achieved through AS flooding alone, but the addition of polymer was important for improving recovery.

Tests were also run on a parallel core system, containing cores of relatively high and low permeability. This was a representation of a post-CHOPS reservoir containing preferential flow channels due to the presence of wormholes. Both surfactant and ASP solutions only accessed the high permeability core, so oil was bypassed in the lower permeability sand even with the addition of chemicals to water. This result demonstrates that laboratory studies may be dramatically over-estimating the success of chemical flooding in heavy oil, and poses a challenge for successful implementation of chemical floods in heterogeneous post-CHOPS heavy oil fields.

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