Offshore Heavy Oil Polymerflooding Pilot Reveals Alternative Paths
Authors: Carpenter Chris 
Published: May 2021

This article, written by JPT Technology Editor Chris Carpenter, contains highlights of paper OTC 30277, “Twelve-Year Field Applications of Offshore Heavy Oil Polymerflooding From Continuous Injection to Alternating Injection of Polymer and Water,” by Guangming Pan, Lei Zhang, and Jianting Huang, CNOOC, et al., prepared for the 2020 Offshore Technology Conference Asia, originally scheduled to be held in Kuala Lumpur, 2-6 November. The paper has not been peer reviewed. Copyright 2020 Offshore Technology Conference. Reproduced by permission.
Polymerflooding has been considered a suitable method for reservoirs with viscosities up to 150 mPa·s. The authors of the complete paper verify that alternating injection of polymer and water in the Bohai Bay of China proved effective and economical for heavy oil fields, even offshore. This polymerflooding pilot of initially continuous, and then alternating, injection can provide a useful technical reference for similar reservoirs.

Introduction
Heavy oil reserves are abundant in the Bohai oil field of China. The development of the field has proved that the field with lower viscosity (less than 350 mPa·s) can be developed effectively by water-flooding, while the unconventional heavy oil reservoir with high viscosity has not formed a mature development mode. To better use interwell reserves, a pilot polymerflooding test has been conducted in the NN field since 2008. The cumulative production of nine wells in the surrounding area reached 10.80×104 m3, which confirmed that polymer fluid injection had a good displacement effect on unconventional high-viscosity crude oil. However, with the extension of continuous injection time, the pilot test area faced various problems. In order to explore the applicability of polymerflooding technology used in offshore unconventional heavy oil fields, the polymer-injection mode was studied on the basis of laboratory experimental data and field practice, and the polymer/water alternating injection mode was analyzed.

Experimental
Continuous Polymerflooding. Experimental Equipment and Materials. The experimental device is composed of a driving system, an experimental model, a pressure-measurement system, a produced-liquid-collection system, and a temperature-control system. According to the distribution of reservoir physical properties in the NN field, a parallel double-tube displacement experiment with a permeability ratio of 5 was designed. The experimental cores are artificial, with a tube length of 30 cm and an inner diameter of 2.54 cm. The low-permeability tube has 1624×10-3 µm2 permeability, and the high-permeability tube has 8488×10-3 µm2 permeability. The experimental temperature is 55°C, which is consistent with the formation temperature of the NN field. The polymer is partially hydrolyzed polyacrylamide.
Experimental Procedure. The experimental process includes vacuum pumping, saturating formation water, obtaining core pore volume, saturating simulated oil, calculating oil saturation water drive to a specified water cut, continuously injecting polymer solution, and measuring data. The experimental injection rate is 0.2 mL/min, and the multiple of injected pore volumes (PV) is 0.6 PV. The NN field has weak edge water, and the water cut of the well group was 60 to 90% when polymerflooding was performed. Therefore, the design scheme mainly includes waterflooding and polymerflooding stages. The polymer- injection concentration was 3000 mg/L, and the injection mode is continuous, consistent with the field test.