An Experimental Study of Polymer Flooding to Enhance Oil Recovery

Polymer flooding as an Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) process is received more attention these days because of high oil price compared to other EOR processes. The viscosity of polymer solutions increases as the polymer is dissolved in water due to high molecular weight of the polymers, results in more favorable mobility ratio. Therefore, more oil recovery and sweep efficiency will be obtained. This study concerns polymer flooding using Hydrolyzed Polyacryle Amide (HPAM). Sand packed columns are utilized in this study to investigate the ability of HPAM to improve the sweep efficiency of polymer flooding using an Iranian crude oil. Various polymer concentrations and several slugs of polymer solution with different volumes are injected. The effect of injection rate on recovery factor is also investigated. As it was expected, more polymer concentration resulted in higher recovery factor. Besides, increasing the volume of polymer slugs, slightly improved the oil recovery efficiency. Higher oil recovery factor was also achieved during the low injection rate of polymer solution compared to the higher injection rate. Generally, taking physical and economical aspects into consideration, it can be concluded that a polymer flooding at low injection rates, medium polymer concentrations and medium slug volumes are more efficient.