Combining Conformance Treatment with Mobility Control Improves Oil Sweep Efficiency in Non-Cross Flow Heterogeneous Reservoirs

On water flooding process, water preferential flow through high permeability, fractures, and large channels; cause a large amount of recycling of water without much benefit to oil production. Preformed particle gels (PPGs) have drawn more attention to reduce the fluid flow in these large opening features and to improve macroscopic oil efficiency. In spite of the successful applications of using PPGs in plugging such large features, there is still need to combine PPGs with other technology to produce more oil from the low permeable rich zones. The ultimate purpose of this study is to investigate the effectiveness of combining conformance control treatment using PPGs with mobility control using polymer to enhance oil recovery from both swept and un-swept oil zones. PPGs was injected into large permeability zones to reduce their permeability while polymer injected after gel to further increase oil recovery from the low permeability zones. Two separate parallel tubes packed with different sand grain sizes were designed to emulate the case when there is non-cross flow heterogenity between the low and the high permeability layers in the reservoir. Experiments were designed to examine the effect of permeability contrast ratio on the performance of coupling PPG and polymer to increase oil recovery. The results show a significant increase in oil recovery from both low and high permeability cores after performing polymer flooding right away after gel treatment. The oil recovery incremental was varied and strongly dependent on permeability contrast ratios. PPGs improved oil sweep efficiency significantly when the core permeability layers became more heterogeneous. Injection profile was improved after the PPG treatment, thus oil recovery from the low permeability cores was increased significantly.