A Novel Smart and Intelligent Material for both Conformance and Mobility Control---A Single Process to Combine Gel Treatment and Polymer Flooding for Enhanced Oil Recovery
- Detailed Technology Description
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- Others
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- *Abstract
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A novel crosslinked hydrogel system is proposed, synthesized and can be engineered into different sizes of preformed particle gels (PPGs) according to the condition of underground formation in most cases of sandstone and carbonate formation. The PPGs dispersion can be injected through the injection well into the underground formation without obvious shear thinning since its viscosity is very low comparing with that of the polymer solutions from the polymer flooding, SP or ASP etc. The PPGs will be served as a plugging agent for a designed and controlled period to improve the conformance control so that future kinds of flooding techniques can be used to sweep the oil out of the formation pores to the production well. However, depending on the reservoir temperature, pH and formation water salinity, PPGs will eventually completely hydrolyze and decompose into the linear polymer chain solutions which makes the in-situ polymer solution upon time evolution. Therefore, the polymer solution can move in the reservoir formation to serve as polymer flooding. As a result, no strong shear thinning is involved for this in-situ generated polymer solution. Overall, our unique and novel hydrogel system can integrate together two enhanced oil recovery (EOR) methods of PPGs based conformance control and polymer flooding into one smart and diligent material and process operating system.
- *Principal Investigator
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Name: Baojun Bai, Associate Professor, Petroleum Engineering
Department:
Name: Tingji Tang, Research Scientist
Department:
- Country/Region
- USA
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